As an early birthday present to myself this year, I bought the 7artisans 6mm f/2 fisheye lens in Fujifilm x-mount to use with my Fuji X-T4 and Fuji X-T1 cameras. I've always been a bit of a fan of wide angle lenses, but I've never owned a fisheye before and I thought it might make me see the world in a slightly different way. It turns out that it did.
The 7artisans 6mm f/2 fisheye lens
I was quite impressed with the quality of the lens as soon as I received and removed it from its nicely made presentation box. It is a solid, well made lens constructed from metal including a metal lens mount, and has a weighty feel to it. The two adjustment rings, one towards the back of the lens for focus and the aperture ring at the front of the lens, feel precise and are easy to use.
The aperture ring has click stops from f/2 to f/16, and the focus ring has a well damped action, focusing from infinity to 0.1 meter in about a quarter turn.
The front element is bulbous and the lens has a fixed lens hood permanently in place. Because of the shape of the front element and lens hood, the lens cap is quite deep and fits over the hood to protect the front element and I particularly liked the velvet that has been fitted into the lens cap so that it slides easily in place and is held.
The lens itself is completely manual in operation - there is no communication with the camera body - so you need to turn on the option in the camera body that lens you shoot without a lens attached. That also means the the images you take won't have any metadata the identifies the lens or focal length, unless you can set that in the camera body1.
Although the lens is quite heavy, I found it to be well balanced on the X-T1 body - I guess a lens as short as this fisheye is not going to feel as if it will pull the camera down at the front, but its weight adds to the professional feel.
Using the 7artisans 6mm f/2 fisheye lens with the Fuji X-T1.
The Fuji X-T1, like most of the Fuji range and I suspect nearly all modern mirrorless cameras has fantastic support for manual focus lenses, so I found using the lens in practice quite easy. It's helped by the fact that being a 6mm lens the depth of field is huge, so for many of my shots around Cardiff city, I could set the aperture to f/8 and everything from about half a meter in front of the lens to infinity was in focus.
I shot in Aperture priority mode by selecting Auto ISO and Auto shutter speed on the camera and then using the aperture ring to basically adjust the depth of field, although as I said that really only applies if I was shooting an object up close.
And that's one of the nice things about this lens - you can get really close to an object. The photo shown here was taken at the Thetford forest Centerparcs site during a holiday with the family in July this year. I went out with the lens early in the morning, and tried to find subjects that I could photograph quite close to the lens and see how the extreme wide angle would still give a fair amount of background coverage in the photo.
In this particular shot I kept the aperture open at f/2, so the background is blurred, but if I'd taken the same shot at f/16 then the whole of the image would have been sharp. The pine cone was very close to the front element of the lens - probably about 6 inches away.
The focus adjuster has quite a short throw as I mentioned above, only about a quarter turn, but if felt completely 'right' for this lens. For times when I needed to set the focus, when the aperture was open and the subject close to the camera, the short throw of the focus ring made it easy to get it right. Although the X-T1 has several focus aids for manual focus lenses, I found it most effective to use the normal focus peaking rather than digital split image or dual view modes, although I did sometimes use the magnified view with focus peaking, especially on images where the subject was close to the camera.
I found I used the LCD on the back of the camera much more than using the viewfinder, which meant I tended to take photos from waist level rather than from eye level, which made some of the photos I took more appealing in my eye.
One thing that becomes apparent very early on when using a fisheye is how much coverage the lens has. You have to make a conscious effort to make sure you keep your feet and arms out of the image. Although I tried to do that, I notice that in some of the images I've included below I can just make out a shadow in one photo and what looks like my jacket in the bottom corner of another.
The other obvious effect with a fisheye is the huge distortion, but that is part of the reason for buying the lens - if you want images where verticals remain vertical then you wouldn't buy a fisheye. The whole point of getting a fisheye really is to try to use the distortion to create a new view on the world. You can use things like railings to create a porthole effect that can frame a subject. I found it particularly interesting to point the camera up to the sky in the middle of a flower bed and a couple of the images in the gallery show this effect.
Gallery of 7artisans 6mm f/2 fisheye lens sample photos
The gallery that follows shows a sample of some of the photos I took with the 7artisans 6mm fisheye lens on a city break to Cardiff we took this year. Many of the photos use the curved effect to include a whole scene in a single picture, but others show an almost normal viewpoint, like the first photo of the large stones in Cardiff Bay, and the portrait view of Cardiff castle.
All the photos were shot in raw and processed using ON 1 Photo RAW.
My Conclusion
So what are my thoughts on the 7artisans 6mm f/2 Fisheye lens?
Well, I'm very impressed with the quality of the lens both in terms of its build quality and its image quality. I'm not one for pixel peeping and there may be images where the corner of the photo is not a sharp as the centre, but I don't tend to look at that. If I look at the overall photo there are many that I like, which is basically what I'm looking for.
I'm also impressed with the affordability of the lens. When I bought it I think it cost me about £180 which is very good value for such a nice lens.
The other thing that impressed me was the amount of sheer fun I had shooting with it. I found it gave me lots of opportunities to take pictures in places and from angles I probably wouldn't otherwise have tried, so that's a good thing.
I think if you are looking for a lens that gives you a different perspective on the photos you take you might like to try this affordable lens.
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I did set that up, and then forgot to select the correct lens, so all the photos I took actually had the wrong focal length and I had to run an exiftool command to correct them. ↩
