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There is a small built-in lens hood, but a lens of this type cannot accommodate screw-on filters or filter holders. With some care, I found it was possible to hand-hold a 100mm square StarGlow filter in front of the lens to add a soft focus effect to stars. Add to that the following problem: I no longer have the accessory EVF. I hated using it. The M’s live view is pants, going too fast to jello, slowing way down in low light, and getting in the way of other, more important accessories. The AstrHori 12mm 2.8 Fisheye was kindly provided free of charge by AstrHori for reviewing purpose for a few weeks. What is a fisheye lens?
This is only the second fisheye lens being reviewed here, so it might make sense to have a short look what differentiates a fisheye lens from a normal ultra wide angle lens. Most of this section is taken from my TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 Fisheye review. With the sun close to the corner or just out of the frame the situation is worse though – as is the case with most lenses by the way. Wide open we have some patterns that look like internal reflections that go away on stopping down (see comparison above). Astrophotographers make use of every focal length lens available, with the widest being fish-eye lenses that take in a full sweep of up to 180 degrees (°) of sky. While they are specialized lenses, fish-eyes allow unique images not possible with any other lens, even using techniques such as shooting panoramas. Barrel distortion is obviously very noticeable and that’s the whole idea behind this lens – the closer is the object is to the lens, the bigger the distortion is As do all lenses of its type, the TTArtisan exhibited darkening of the corners, or vignetting, in this case by about 1.3 stops at the extreme corners at f/2.8, and just less than one stop at f/4. This was easily correctable in raw image processing to make the sky look uniformly illuminated.When you adapt it to a medium forma (55mm sensor), this lens is a beautiful portrait fisheye. The built-in lens hood is removed. The Fisheye-Hemi Plug-In automaticaly remaps your fisheye images to minimize distortion and maximize the preservation of all image details. By f/5.6 I'd say the corners get to good. Given that the DOF markings on the lens would suggest that 2 feet to infinity would be in acceptable focus at that point, it's quite possible to get edge to edge results that look very good with this lens. I'd say that the lens is best at f/5.6 whether you're using it in close or with subjects at far distances, so there doesn't seem to be any optical favoring with distance that we see in some lens designs. With a fisheye lens, thanks to their huge viewing angle, you will often have the sun or other point light sources in the frame, so a good performance here is kinda important. The AstrHori 50mm 1.4 Tilt already fared surprisingly well in this category, will this fisheye manage to do the same? Sony A7III | AstrHori 12mm 2.8 Fisheye | f/8.0
One thing that will become very clear if you try to shoot a flat surface up close is that this lens has considerable field curvature, and it doesn't appear to a perfect curve, at that. Thus, consider this as you're shooting with this lens: perhaps the central third of the lens on each axis is going to be at or very near the focal plane you choose. Flat objects outside that are going to go soft.With our usual approach we cannot get decent values on the vignetting of fish-eye lenses. What I can tell you is that the vignetting figures are significantly lower than those of rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses, especially compact ones. Sony A7III | TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 fisheye | f/8.0 The across frame performance is solid from f/2.8 but stopping down doesn’t change much actually. The midframe gets slightly sharper at f/5.6 and the corners look best at f/11 but in both cases there isn’t that huge difference compared to shooting this lens wide open. The performance is actually similar to what I have seen with the smaller TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 Fisheye.
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