fish-eye

May 2025: Fish-eyed Fun by John Ritchie

Birkenstock on railroad tracks

Truckin’

One advantage (of many) to belonging to Light Rider Studios is that we share our toys. Recently I borrowed a 12mm fish-eye lens for my Pentax K-1000 from Koa and shot a few rolls of film. I’ve never used a fish-eye before and it was a lot of fun!

People

Fish-eye lenses make great weird people pictures!

Architecture

I can’t help but see faces everywhere.

Cat

Anytime I’m playing with something new, Gatsby is interested.

The following is the photo I had in mind when I loaded the camera with old (expired 1968) black-and-white film. I thought the grainy, flawed fish-eye would be a good treatment for the subject. To me, this looks like 60s-era black and white TV.

Caged

I love the distortion that the fish-eye lens provides, it’s like an alien way of seeing. If I had one of my own, the challenge would be to keep the photographs interesting - to compose photographs that use the strength of the lens without just being a fish-eye take on something ordinary. I think many of these photos are kind of the latter - a fishy view of an ordinary subject - but some of them, I hope, use the distortion to make a new meaning. That’s my goal anyway.