A fisheye lens is an ultra-wide-angle lens designed for shooting wide angles, usually 180°. Fisheye lenses use a special mapping, instead of producing an image with straight lines of perspective. This gives the resulting images a characteristic convex non-rectilinear appearance.
Index
History
The term fisheye was introduced by an American physicist Robert W. Wood, in the year 1906. He published a paper detailing the experiment in which he built a camera in a water-filled pail starting with a photographic plate at the bottom.
A short focus lens with a pinhole diaphragm located approximately halfway up the pail and a sheet of glass at the rim to suppress ripples in the water.
The experiment was developed based on how a fish would see an ultrawide hemispherical view from beneath the water.
![Robert W. Wood](https://protonstalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Robert-W.-Wood.png)
Types of Fisheye Lens
There are two main types of fisheye lens.
Full Frame Fisheye Lens
These types of lenses are capable of capturing a 180° field of view when measuring from corner to corner. They have a 180° diagonal angle of view. The horizontal and vertical angles of view will be smaller.
![Full frame fisheye lens](https://protonstalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Full-Frame-Fisheye-Lens.png)
Circular Fisheye Lens
These were the first types of fisheye lenses to be developed. They are projected as a circle. They have a 180° vertical angle of view and the horizontal and diagonal angle of view are also 180°.
![Circular Fisheye lens](https://protonstalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Circular-Fisheye-Lens.png)
Characteristics of Fisheye Lens
- Focal length: Focal length of circular type is 8mm to 10mm generally. Full frame fisheye lenses have a 15mm to 16mm focal length.
- Angle of view: Fisheye lenses have an angle of view of 180°.
- Mapping function: The different mapping functions used are rectilinear, equidistant, equisolid, orthographic, and stereographic.
Applications
- Fisheye lenses are widely used in planetariums to project the night sky onto the interior of the dome.
- In order to create an immersive environment for pilots, flight simulators are used.
- Many photographers and videographers across the world use fisheye lenses for capturing close action shots without having to sacrifice the context background.
- Fisheye lenses are also used by astronomers to capture cloud cover data and light pollution data.
FAQs
Angle of view describes the angular extent of a given scene that is captured in an image by a camera.