Cool! What is "de-fishing"? Something to do produce a straight horizon?
Douglas Bolt
DougBoltPhotography.com
The sunburst is nice, the horizon stills looks odd.
Why would you shoot with a fisheye and then try to straighten it?
Isn't the point of having a fisheye lens to take unusual photo's?
Just wondering......
Dan Kearl
Hi David - I agree the sunburst is nice and so is golden tone of the wheat(?). The horizon seems to need some ccw rotation. There's something light blue in the wheat about halfway between the tree and the left edge that draws the eye. I'm also not sure what it is.
TFS,
Rachel
Interesting use of flare in the image.
Others have already commented on the rotation - rotation seems odd to me also.
If it were mine, I'd also do a little masking/lightening to make the tree's trunk separate from the shadowed wheat.
And to me it looks stronger if you'd crop off about a third of the bottom to make it a panorama - give it a try and see what you think
the crop cut that I like is just a little lower than where the sunburst hits the right hand side.
The horizon is correct, it does slope from left to down right.
You can use a fisheye to get an ultra-wide rectilinear view. This 15mm lens has a 180-degree diagonal field of view. It gives you an different perspective than you might get with something like a 24mm wide-angle. Here, I'm 3-ft. from the tree trunk and take in around 160-degree FoV after correction.
By the way, that wheat like grass is classic "short grass prairie". It's what the writer of the lyrics to "America" saw from the top of Pikes Peak when she turned away from the "purple mountains" to look at "amber waves of grain." This is where the "great plain" begins. Some say that she saw wheat, but those people have likely never been here. Wheat was not planted here in great quantities in the 1800 and it still isn't so much in Colorado. This is wild grass.
Here's an uncorrected fish-eye shot:
Fisheye Shot by dcstep, on Flickr
Same shot de-fished:
De-fished Image by dcstep, on Flickr
What do you guys do with ambiguous horizons? I look for other references, like the tree trunks in this image. Clearly, even though it looks right to me, it disturbs others.
Very nice image! I wouldn't have thought it was that wide angle. I find the tree intriguing and might want to see a little more of it. Love the starburst.
There is some hint here that the horizon is on a slope, but in a case like this where it could be taken as an oversight, I have no worries about correcting it. If a rotation made the tree look off, I'd go to Distort and pull down the LL corner. After all, I might have used a view camera without people worrying if I had altered the truth of a scene.
Hi David, the Sigma fisheye does produce lovely sunstars. I have shot everything from landscapes to bullfrogs with it. In this photo I would like to see some separation from the tree and the field...the branches merging with the field grasses bothers me a little...a slightly lower perspective would have fixed this in the field...you could clone them out at this point though if you wished to. When I played around with correcting fisheye distortion with this lens I did notice 'smudging' of image details, particularly in the corners, but I have not tried DXO.