Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 HD Fisheye Lens for Sony E

Had a "Super Wide angle" lens many years back and loved it. I wanted to get the same type lens for my Nikon but the cost of the Nikon lens was just more than I cared to spend based on my needs. Then I found this lens. I spent a lot of time reading reviews all over the web. Seems this lens is sold under a lot of different names and there are a lot of different models of it. Its hard reading the descriptions to know just what you are getting. I would recommend you to to the manufacturer's website and view their catalog if you have any questions.This lens is for the Nikon and it has the "chip" to make it work with some functions with the camera. Yes, its manual focus but honestly, you don't do much focusing with a lens like this. You can just sort of guess the distance and set it for something close to that and be fine. Of course with a digital you can just shoot some test shots and set it up that way also.This Nikon model with the "chip" does share info with the camera so its very easy to use both with and without a flash. When properly set it will set the aperture automatically. Also I find it to work very well metering automatically with my flash. I am using this lens on both a Nikon D5200 and a D7100. I normally just set the camera to Auto ISO and use the "P" (Program) setting. At most I have only had to make minor adjustments in flash power on more close up type photos. This lens seems to work very well with both of my cameras.How good are the photos? Well, they are great for what I need. I work on a ship and needed photos taken in very confined spaces like the engine room. This lens was just perfect for doing extreme wide angle shots as well as close ups. Clarity is very good as is color. In some recent photos I did I noted that when I enlarged some of the photos I could easily read the text on items ten or fifteen feet away. It was quite impressive. I have used more expensive lens that did no better but cost much more.There are several models of this lens so take your time and pick the one that is right for you. You can buy if without the "chip" and save a few bucks but considering the small difference in price and how well the "chipped"" model works I would go with this one. Also you can buy it with a fixed (built in) hood or a removable hood like this one. I went with the removable hood as I also use this on my full frame camera and I wanted to be able to shoot without hoot if I wanted. (Be warned...the front element of the lens protrudes out and you need to be careful about getting too close to things).If you use Light Room you can do some computer magic on the photos you take with this lens. I use the lens correction feature and correct much of the curved lines you can get up close. you should experiment with the settings to get the results you want. I think I normally use something like a "Nikon 10mm Fisheye" listing and it cleans up the photos pretty well automatically.I love what I can do with this lens and wonder why I didn't buy one sooner! I would buy this again without hesitation. The lens has more uses than you might think. Fact is if you like photography and like to experiment or if you need a lens that you can use for super wide shots in confined spaces then this is the lens for you. It does the job and you just can not beat the price. Great value and very useful, the perfect combination.

I grabbed a warehouse deal on this lens for an upcoming hiking trip in the national parks. I love my dedicated 7-14mm zoom, but with all the lenses I was planning on traveling with, I needed to reduce some weight in my pack. The Rokinon alone shaved about 1 pound off the weight.That would mean nothing of course if the weight saved came at the expense of optical quality. And I'm glad to say that while I lost the flexibility of the zoom, the images that resulted from this lens were astoundingly good, without a lot of spherical distortion typical of more traditional fish-eye lenses.Manual focus is easily accomplished given the astounding depth of field, typical of these lenses. Most of the time, a setting at "infinity" would suffice. For interior shots, an estimate of 5 feet or more would produce sharp images - even at an aperture of f/3.5Still - it was the outdoor panoramas taken at f/5.6 that really impressed me. Sharp center with only modest distortion towards the edges. The only imperfection - and this may be a deal breaker for some - is the large amount of purple/green fringing (chromatic distortion) that appears on edges as you move towards the image borders. But if you use Lightroom, or other software for post processing, this is very easily corrected/removed.Bottom line is that this lens offers tremendous bang for the buck. Even at full amazon price. Larger than the standard 7.5mm fisheyes (esp. with the micro four thirds mount) it provides better imaging and less fish-eye fatigue in your images. (They can even be merged successfully into larger panoramas)Unless you need/use an 8mm focal length on a regular basis, it truly is hard to justify spending 600-800 more on an ultra wide lens.

I wanted a fisheye lens to work on completing my collection of lenses. I already have two sigma lenses and love them for their quality and cheaper price when compared to canon lenses. I wanted to get a sigma fisheye lens, but I couldn't bring myself to pay up to $700 for a lens that I probably wasn't going to use all that often.Based on the reviews and sample pictures that people had posted, I ended up getting this lens, and I have to say that I am not disappointed. One of the main doubts I had about getting this lens at first was the fact that it was manual focus only. But now, after using it, that hasn't been a problem at all. The focus guide only goes from 0.3m to 1.5m before it hits infinity, so when your subject is more than about 2m away, the focus becomes easier than auto focus would be, and when you're between 0.3 and 1.5 meters you can usually guess pretty close to the actual distance and let the wide DOF make up the difference. Another thing that has helped with focusing was being able to switch to live view briefly and zoom in to get the focus just right, since because of the wide angle things are so small in the view finder. So, it has been easy to use and a wonderful addition to my collection.Two things to note. One of the other things that was drawing me to the sigma fisheye was its close focusing distance (3/4 in away from the front element). This lens doesn't come close to that. I was looking forward to getting some close-up fisheye pictures of different things, but I'm not going to be able to with this lens. But who knows, maybe I'll try some extension tubes or something. I'm not done trying yet. :)The other thing is the lens flare. I really don't mind it, especially since it's a fisheye lens most of the pictures I'm taking tend to by artistic type of shots anyway, the flare can actually add a little bit of creativity to a photo. But it's something to keep in mind as this lens seems to be very susceptible to lens flare.