Canon FD 15mm f/2.8 – Time to go fishing

Well not fishing for real fish but fish-eyeing for images.  I’ve had this Canon FD 15mm f/2.8 S.S.C. Fisheye MF Manual Lens for years.  As you can imagine it’s not the easiest lens to use.  The curvature is, well, fish-eyed.  Back in my commercial photography days there was a period when fish-eyes were “the thing”.  They were used in fashion, industrial and glossy year-end reports.  Once this fad faded out most of these lenses collected dust in lens drawers or cabinets.  Every once in awhile you would see a fish-eye lens used to good effect in architectural or landscape photography when a “grabber” image was required.

My copy was languishing and unloved in the back of the lens cabinet.  I felt I needed a kick in the pants to generate some creative juices so I dusted the lens off and attached it to a Lumix S5M2X.  Naturally the first photo I took was a closeup of my partners face.  She was not impressed!  Her cute little nose looked enormous!  The next day we took a day trip out to a small town called Crossfield.  It’s about 30 minutes north of Calgary, AB and has the best donuts and coffee.  No further motivation needed!  Crossfield is primarily a farming/industrial town.  Besides donuts it provides a large grain elevator operation, heavy equipment sales and repair plus lots of grain bins for sale.

Enough of the travel log.  The Canon FD 15mm f/2.8 S.S.C. Fisheye MF Manual Lens is easily mated to the Lumix S5M2X with an adapter.  The adapter I have allows for open and closed aperture control.  The camera meters the scene in A priority with the lens stopped down.  When getting ready to shoot B&W with the Lumix I use the Leica Monochrome setting plus add just a touch of contrast.  All the shots below were taken at f8 or f16 is I wanted sunstars.  With experimenting the built in orange filter gave me the best rendition.

This lens is very sharp.  Certainly up to todays standards.  I took around 30 images that day having a blast playing with distortion. Several images were worth showing to friends and posting to Instagram.  Using my old analog era Canon, Leica and Nikon lenses has been a revelation to me.  I love how they render the subject matter and bring a level of creativity to image making you just can’t get with the newer razor sharp ultra corrected contrasty lenses of today.  Sure the new lenses have their place but don’t write-off the golden oldies!

Eric

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