Category: historic houses and gardens

A visit to Shugborough Hall with a fish-eye lens. #5from7photo

This week we vistied our local National Trust property Shugborough Hall. For this visit I took a new, cheap (£65) fisheye lens to see how it performed. What I found was that if you want large photos then the images are somewhat soft. However, for websize images the photos are quite reasonable. My biggest problem was remembering to focus and to set the camera to manual focus…

Here are a selection of images:

Wisteria in flower by the house. Although in a sheltered position some of the flowers have been affected by the wind or cold. Only a little distortion is evident here.
A close view of the columns at the front of the building – this makes the distortion quite distinct
This view up the trunk of a beech tree tends to mask the distortion caused by the lens
Close in and low down view of bluebells. The curvature of the scene is obvious
A view of the River Sow. It is hard to tell where the distortion is in this image.

Overall, given the price of the lens, I am quite pleased with the results. I shall use it more (and it makes the camera lighter to carry!)