Following my brother's addiction to the NEX-7 and his continuously growing lens collection, I also decided - again...! - to buy a new toy for my OMD... This is the Samyang 7.5mm f\3.5 fish-eye, a very solid-built manual lens that fits sooo nicely with the OMD camera :)

My firts shots with this combo were made last week-end in Paris at the Bibliothèque square. This was at twilight after my Sunday movie. First thing to underline: it was not easy to shoot there, not because of the lens (actually, it is very easy to use, especially in M mode), but because I have been disturbed by a guard telling me that I was not allowed to take pictures... To make the long story short, I hopefully convinced him to let me shoot, arguing that my camera was small (!) and that the pictures were only for personal use, which is actually totally true (even if I'm showing a couple of ones in the present post). I discovered afterwards that this was a well known issue for photographers... What a crazy world we are livin'in...

 Shot at f\3.5 1/40 ISO 3200,  w/ pin-hole Olympus filter. Great colors aren't they ?

During this first try, I was especially curious to test how wide the angle of view can be with this fish-eye lens. I therefore decided to shoot a test-picture and compare it to a classical 12mm wide angle picture. You can see above the two photos, shot from the same location (sorry, no tripod inside...).

To accurately assess the ultra-wide angle capability of this lens, I performed a de-fish process of the .jpeg using the Hugin software (the Samyang lens is unfortunately not recognized as a fish-eye in the Olympus Viewer tool). This freeware is actually very powerful and simple to use. You fist select your picture, then set your lens characteristics: fish-eye type, focal length, focal length multiplier (2 for m43's). And finally you choose the projection type, the rectilinear one in our de-fishing case, and process. This is practically done ! I also manually slightly corrected the remaining trapezoidal distortion with Olympus Viewer to fully recover a similar perspective compared to the 12mm shot.      

Result obtained after de-fishing. The white rectangles corresponds to what you obtain shooting from the same location with a 7mm, 12mm and 25mm lens (keep in mind that for m43's systems, this corresponds to 14mm, 24mm & 50mm equivalent lengths for 24*36)

As you can see, the results is pretty satisfying. The covered angle of view clearly exceeds what you can do with available ultra-wide angle lenses (e.g. the Pana 7-14mm). The full-size cropped widest picture you can produce here is equivalent to a shot at about 5 to 5.5mm focal length (10 to 11mm equivalent in 24*36) !!! Of course, the resolution in the corners is extremely degraded by the de-fish process, and the distortions & chromatic aberrations visible, so that in the end, you can hardly claim that this lens is comparable to a 5mm lens... But with a reasonable crop (typically from 6.5mm), you can keep an excellent image quality on the whole area.

Well, all in all, I'm really convinced by the image quality and the super-wide angle capabilities of this lens... For the price it costs (250€, 4 times less than the Pana 7-14mm), this lens is REALLY a must-have from my point of view !!!

Since the end of the world has miserably failed (hopefully !), one can move on & explore more deeply life's enjoyments...

This is what I did using the Olympus Viewer software, trying to re-work extensively a couple of landscapes pictures with the Dramatic tone filter. I like this filter that can give very interesting artistic rendering, especially when your picture has very high contrasts.

You can find below my favourite results. The first one shows the small Loch Gamhna in Scotland, and the second one is a shoot of the beacon in Le Croisic, Britain, at sunset...

Do U feel the Celtic spirit !?!