Review: Opteka 6.5mm Fisheye Lens

After getting back into skateboarding I decided to take my skate photography to next level and ended up buying a fisheye since it was a lens I’ve been thinking on buying for a while now. Turns out that in the skate world the Opteka (or Rokinon) fisheye is one of the most popular lenses to buy due to its cheap price and high quality glass. After looking trough eBay for a couple of hours I found the lens at exactly $149.99, pretty damn cheap if you ask me. It arrived after 2 weeks or so and I’ve been using it every time I go shoot to test it.

First Impression: It’s a REALLY wide angle lens, they don’t joke when they say it’s 180 degree view, I find it great since my widest lens is a 18mm this lens is 6.5mm, and boy you notice the difference. The other thing you also notice is the distortion at the edges of the frame, it’s really up to you if you find it disturbing I personally find it really cool, it opens up the door for creativity, and for skateboarding the extreme wide angle is perfect (no wonder why almost every skate photographer/ filmer has it).

One Thing I didn’t like is that the lens doesn’t have an AE chip, I had to set it up as a Non-CPU lens on my camera but it still doesn’t register when I manually change the aperture. If I set the aperture on F/8 for example, the camera will still record F/3.5 which basically sucks because your exposure is going to be off even if the camera meter says it isn’t. What I did is take a picture to see how it was exposed and went from there not following the camera meter.

Before buying it I heard complains about the Manual focusing on the lens, I actually didn’t mind it, its a tight aperture lens so it’ll focus pretty well it’s really not that big of a deal if you know how to focus manually and how your aperture affects this.

Lastly was shooting in direct sunlight and testing chromatic aberration. For being such a cheap lens it handled it like a pro, it still had a bit of chromatic aberration but even the expensive lenses have it, and it’s also an easy fix on Lightroom, again it’s not something I would worry so much about.

Conclusion:

After shooting with this lens literally everywhere for a about 2 weeks I was happy on how the images turned out and I definitely recommend it (there’s also an AE version which I found after I bought it). If I had to give it a number (since I figured people that look for reviews also like scales and numbers) I would give it an 8.0/10 just because of the AE Chip “problem”. Down below are some of the images I took with the lens. Remember to Share this and comment if you’d like.

Lens Review: 8.0/10