The distorted effect in this image is a result of the 8mm fisheye used to make it.

10. Optics Can Be Fun
Some lenses are designed to give you a very different view than you get with the naked eye.

Fisheye lenses are probably the best known of these. These extreme wide-angle lenses are not corrected for distortion and can hence take in a much wider field of view than a conventional wide-angle. They can be full-field (the image fills the whole frame) or circular-image (the image appears in a circle in a field of black).

Some lenses can be tilted in their mounts, which lets you manipulate the plane of focus. Fiddle with this one way and you can limit the focus to a very small area, with the rest of the image blurred out. Fiddle with it another way, and you can get nearly everything in focus. You can do this in a very precise way with expensive tilt-shift lenses, or in a more loosey-goosey fashion with a less expensive Lensbaby.

These effects can, of course, be overdone, but they’re fun and can expand your horizons, literally and figuratively.

TIP: Fisheyes are great for outdoor scenes, but they can be very effective indoors, too—in a tiny shop or a boat’s cabin, for example.