Canon 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye on a Canon 1D Mark IV (APS-H 1.3x)

Recently I have been playing with the Canon 8-15mm f/4L fisheye, it's a great lens and the image quality at f/4 wide open produces pictures that are useable and of sufficient sharpness. Essentially, this lens is more catered towards full frame users, and you tend to use only either 8mm to produce the circular fisheye image (all black and just one circle) or at 15mm where you get a full diagonal and traditional fisheye.

So what does this look like on a APS-H camera?

 At 8mm on 1D Mark IV, you get a cropped-off circlular fisheye, which doesn't really look pleasing.

  At 12mm on 1D Mark IV, this is the perfect fisheye for a APS-H camera where you maximise the full diagonals.

At 15mm on 1D Mark IV, its more zoomed-in and totally not very pleasing.

Nevertheless, it still makes pretty decent pictures if you know where to point this lens at. Most APS-H users would find that they only end up using 12mm, which produces fisheye images like these:

Canon 1D Mark IV, 1/8th, f/4, ISO 3200, pure unedited JPG image.

Canon 1D Mark IV, 1/40th, f/4, ISO 1600, pure unedited JPG image.

On the overall, this is a fun lens to have, but if you are on a cropped camera, you might not be able to utilise the full potentials of this lens. A good-to-have but not necessary as there are other ways to create fisheye images, e.g. using post-processing methods or other third party fisheye lenses.

One downside is the lens cap (LENS CAP 8-15) is plastic, and I doubt you might be able to get a replacement if this is damaged. When I go around shooting with this lens, I usually keep the lens cap with EW-77 hood on until I am ready to shoot something as I do not want to end up knocking or leaving fingerprints on the front element.


Cheers hope this was useful for you!

Regards,
www.lioneldudephotography.com
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