A Tale of Two Lenses: Olympus 9mm Fisheye

A few weeks ago at a camera event I had a chance to try the new Olympus 9mm Fisheye Body Cap lens. For $100 you get a 18mm equivalent, manual focusing, f/8 lens that is so much fun to use. I’ve been using it on my Panasonic Lumix GX7 with focus peaking. The lens only has three focus settings so focus peaking comes in handy so you can see what is going to be in focus. The combination of 9mm at f/8 also gives extreme depth-of-field. Make sure you go into the menu on your Micro Four-thirds camera and turn on the “Shoot Without Lens” option since this lens has no electronics to communicate with the camera.

Since this is a full frame fisheye lens you will see quite a bit of distortion in the images coming out of the camera. My friend and Portland photographer, Jerome Hart , showed me a simple trick to correct distortion in RAW files from either the Olympus 9mm or the Lumix 8mm lenses by using Adobe Lightroom. In Lightroom’s develop mode got to Lens Correction > Profile > Custom> Make: Sigma > Model: Sigma 10mm f/2.8 fisheye and watch the distortion disappear.

On Monday, I’ll complete my “tale” and write about my other favorite new lens, the 12-32mm Lumix kit lens from the Lumix GM-1.—Mark Toal