Happy news! My Peleng 8mm fisheye lens arrived from Belarus! This was my Dad's Christmas gift to me this year (actually, he gave me a gift certificate for a Zenitar 16mm lens that was on my wish list, but I decided to chip in some extra cash to get the Peleng instead). I've been waiting almost a month for it to show up, so I was very excited to see the delivery notice on my door last week.

On Friday and Saturday I spent time experimenting with the lens to figure out how it works and to make sure I understand how to use it properly. I found that it is very (very!) soft when it is wide open at f/3.5. It can't really be used at that aperture, but the good news is that it gets significantly better at f/4. Once the warm weather comes I will have to run some tests to see if it will be sharp enough for ultra-wide astrophotography. From f/4 to f/16 there is a pretty much linear improvement in sharpness, so for daytime use I will be trying to shoot with small apertures as much as possible.

On Sunday, Ken hosted a chilli cookoff/housewarming party at his new house in Kitchener. It is a brand new house, which is why at the moment it doesn't seem to exist on the Google Map below. There was plenty of tasty chilli and other good stuff, and everyone got a personal tour of the new digs. I took the opportunity to try out my new lens in a "real world" setting. Of course, it was indoors so I couldn't use a small aperture... I compromised and set it to f/5.6.

Anyway, this is a shot of Ken's kitchen and part of his living room on the right. Technically this photo is not the greatest since everyone is backlit, but it was the best "party shot" I got. I took this with my Rebel XT with Peleng 8mm at ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/30s exposure. I digitally pushed it 1.5 stops because my metering was off. This amplified some noise so I ran it through Noise Ninja before resizing and sharpening in Photoshop. Fun stuff!

Comments

It will be interesting to see what the Peleng can do for astrophotography.  You
should watch out for two things:

1.  CA, the Russian lenses have some nasty
CA, especially wide open
2.  Coma, this is partially from CA, but also from
other imperfections

I would definitely recommend stopping down, I would say at
least 2-3 stops from wide open, but I would go even as far as to suggest f/8