Nikon AF 10.5mm DX fisheye

When I moved to digital this was the first fisheye lens I had. The Nikon is a full frame fisheye as apposed to a circular fisheye. It is a great little lens, and opens up an awful lot of creative possibilities once you’ve had the opportunity to learn how to use it to its full effect and not make your clients/relatives look like they are at a fun fair.

Its a small little lens, butdon’t let that fool you as its really quite well made. Being a DX lens, it is obviously only for Nikon’s cropped sensor camera’s so there is no chance of using this on an older film body. Its performance is very good indeed, the sharpness is very respectable although with a fisheye this is less of a concern than with some other lenses.

The other things one normally worries about with lenses are distortions and vignetting, but of course they don’t count in this instance. The last area of interest is chromatic aberrations, CA’s, and the Nikon isn’t free of CA but for the type of lens its not a terrible performance. CA’s are of course able to be corrected, so of all the performance issues, the easiest to fix in software

I ended up switching to the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye but that isn’t because the Tokina is a better performer. They are about even as far as performance goes, if its of much concern in this case. If anything, the Nikon is slightly better as far as CA goes, so if splitting hairs the Nikon is the slightly better of the two as far as performance but I ended up wanting the additional opportunities the 10-17mm zoom offered as a fisheye is a lens that doesn’t get used a great deal so anything that is going to enable more opportunities for use is a good thing. The other area that the Nikon offering has an advantage is the fact that is has a f/2.8 aperture, but with a 10mm fisheye this is of little concern anyway. Autofocus is fast of course as it doesn’t really have much of a range to try and find focus so its almost instant, again not a plus or minus for either lens. I really liked having this lens about a great deal and would be happy to have it again - I’d perhaps buy this one next time if something happened to the Tokina as they are so equally good there isn’t much in it, so perhaps price would be the final deciding factor.