Sony Nex- 7 and the Rokina 8mm Fisheye - Sample photos, 100% crops and First Impressions

Sony Nex- 7 and the Rokinon 8mm Fisheye – Sample photos, 100% crops and First Impressions

In this article I’m going to go over the E-Mount Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens using the Sony Nex-7 as the camera body. The fish eye lens by nature seems to be a love or hate type of relationship I’ve noticed, and the Rokina 8mm Fishyeye is no different in this regard. The distortion is what causes a lot of people to say “what the??”, but it’s the distortion that I like and when used on a good “fisheye” subject the results are very good!

The Rokinon 8mm fisheye is a all manual lens, so you need to adjust both the focus and aperture on the lens itself. In addition to that, the Sony Nex-7 does not recognize that there is a lens attached due to the lens not having any electronics in it. So you will need to enable the feature to “shoot without a lens in the menu settings. I have a video on how to set-up the Nex-7 for lens adapters and it’s the same exact procedure for an all manual lens like the Rokinon 8mm Fisheye.

Once you have the Nex-7 all set-up the Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens is a breeze to use. Just set the focus and fire away, and because it’s an ultra wide angle the Depth of field is really deep making focus a breeze. It’s not so critical in other words like on a telephoto zoom where the slightest missed focus point results the sharpness being in the wrong spot. Just to let you know, the exif data was not captured during shooting as it relates to the lens, because there is no electronics in the lens. So the Aperture I used was not recorded into the metadata. However, I used an aperture of f/5.6 and f/8 for every image below unless otherwise specified in the Caption just below the image.

The Rokinon 8mm lens is very well made and feels extremely solid and durable. The incredible low price of ~$300 US is what initially attracted me to it, and once I realized it was full manual it made sense why it was so cheap considering the solid build quality.

Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens

Rokinom 8mm fisheye lens

Nex-7 w/ Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens

Moving on, lets look at some sample pics from the Sony Nex-7 and the Rokinon 8mm Fisheye Lens!! I tried to take as many different real world sample pics as possible. Symmetry as you will see is very helpful when trying to find a cool composition when using fisheye lens! The distortion is so extreme that if there is no symmetry your eye gets sucked right out of the frame. If you have ever used a fisyeye lens, you know what I’m talking about

On a side note, I love the fisheye lens in general and personally own the Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye Lens which works awesome on my Full Frame Canon 5d Mark II.

Be sure to click on the images to see the true 100% crops

This first image is from the HDR and Nex-7 article. As you can see the symmetry makes this composition a perfect contender for the fisheye!! This image can be printed quite large if I want as the 24MP Nex-7 sensor has killer resolution. This image is made up of 4 exposures all combined and edited in Photomatix Pro 4, Lightroom, and Photoshop CS5 just to let you know.

Nex-7 w/ Rokinon 8mm Fisheye Lens – Fully Edited

Now keep in mind this is a Fully Edited HDR image so it will look a bit exaggerated when it comes to colors, contrast, and sharpness at 100%

Nex-7 w/ Rokinon 8mm Fisheye Lens

This is my friend’s truck at work. Notice the corrected 100% crop below if your curious how the corners look slightly developed. I found -29 or so on the Chromatic Aberrations – red/cyan is pretty good for a quick fix