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Thank you Belomo for my new le…

First impressions:

under construction

A teammate just brought me my new Peleng fisheye made by Belomo from his last business-trip to Moscow. What a great day! After opening the cheap looking cardbox I´ve found a fake-leather-quiver with the lens inside. My lens comes with a Nikon lens mount adapter and a set of filters (yellow, red, UV) you can screw behind the lens. The first big positive surprise was the lenscap. Older versions of this lens had a lenscap that falls off the lens, because the inner ring of the cap is too wide open. This never version has some cell foam inside and fits perfectly without that problem. The build quality is very descent. The full lens-body is made of metal.

Mounting it on a Nikon D80 body:

After mounting this lens on a Nikon D80 you will expect a small drawback. You can´t messure the exposure with the built-in lightmeter. You can use this lens only in "manual mode" were you can only set the shutter-speed. But this is not a real problem. You can do it by guessing the time and reviewing the histogram after the shot on the screen or by using an external cheap lightmeter.

Image Quality:

mix it!

I did some test-shots at a construction-yard in front of my place of work. I really need some more experience with this lens but the first test-shots are quite good. You should stop down this lens to an aperture between 8 and 16 to get the best results. Focussing is not really necessary with this lens at an aperture higher than eight. You will have a great depth of field with this lens. Just use google and search for hyperfocal distance for more information. The only great problem with this lens is lens-flare. It´s hard to keep the sun out of the most of your photos. But it is not a real problem with this lens.

Why fisheye?

A fisheye is perfect for panoramas (360°), architecture-shots and taking photos in damn small rooms. If you don´t want to have cured lines you can defish your photo with some special software and you will get a super-wide-photo with straight lines. (just look at the photo on the right)

My conclusion:

For about 235 Euros you won´t find a fisheye lens with this quality on the market. It has a great field of view and the build quality is very decent. Just look on ebay. You won´t find a used Peleng there at the moment. If you have one, you won´t give it away...