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For it's reasonable price, this lens is probably a bargain. I have no problems recommending this lens to someone who's interested in exploring the full frame fisheye world. Just realize that (1) you'll be manually focusing, (2) you have to account for field curvature with some subjects, and (3) you'll going to want to do both distortion correction and chromatic aberration correction of the final images.
The TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 is a diagonal fisheye, meaning it covers a field of view of 180° diagonally. There are also circular fisheyes that cover only a round image with a field of view of 180° in all directions. Performance wise, I'm pretty impressed. TL/DR - it's almost as good as the Olympus 8mm f1.8 - and I hold that lens in very high regard (it's certainly the best FE on the m43 format and there are a number of other credible options there, including a Panasonic/Leica version and one from Samyang that is well respected). Things of particular note about the TTArtisan: However, while some lenses behave badly when refocused with clip-in filters, the TTArtisan still showed good star images across the frame, trading the astigmatism at the corners for mild coma and some image softness. With no automatic lens profile available, correcting vignetting required dialing in manual corrections, here +60 Vignette and 0 Midpoint in Adobe Camera Raw. Credit: Alan DyerOne thing that will become very clear if you try to shoot a flat surface up close is that this lens has considerable field curvature, and it doesn't appear to a perfect curve, at that. Thus, consider this as you're shooting with this lens: perhaps the central third of the lens on each axis is going to be at or very near the focal plane you choose. Flat objects outside that are going to go soft. I haven’t used this one. In terms of weight and size it sits inbetween the aforementioned AstrHori and this TTArtisan lens. Now I must admit, I’m not particularly into fisheye photography. Nor is a fisheye lens the first type of lens that I think of as being particularly compatible with Leica rangefinder cameras – especially if said fisheye doesn’t come with a viewfinder. In fact, to a degree, I do (or at least did) slightly question the sense of making a fisheye lens for m-mount cameras at all. Open full-size image in new tab. Same image at f/4 with 200% zoomed-in crop boxes showing star performance. Corner stars a bit sharper than at f/3.5. Still some chromatic abberation and coma, but not obtrusive. Open full-size image in new tab. 4 min. single exposure at f/4.5, ISO 1600, Canon EOS Ra, Bortle 3 sky.
I’ve written here before. I’m a still life advertising and event photographer based in Japan. I do weddings, embassy powwows, corporate events, audiophile meet-ups, and shoot everything from jewellery to headphones. If you want to see, read, or listen to my opinions on lenses, cameras, and audio doo-dads, by all means hit me up at my blog: ohm image, and my YouTube channel: Fauxtaku Lounge. Just like the TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 this AstrHori 12mm 2.8 is a diagonal fisheye, meaning it covers a field of view of 180° diagonally. There are also circular fisheyes that cover only a round image with a field of view of 180° in all directions.So instead of pre-focusing, I had to take advantage of the Leica M10-P’s zoom and focus peaking – this was fine, but it slowed me down, which isn’t ideal when your about 20cm from someone else’s face. This all said, everyone seemed to get on board with how I was entertaining myself making their faces look all distorted and weird. Conventional portraiture this certain is not, but I am more than pleased with the outcome. In terms of the color scheme this looks very much like a Leica M lens including the famous red dot. Markings are yellow/white (seem to be slightly engraved and filled with paint) and the focus ring has a very nice resistance and turns about 90° from the minimum focus distance of 0.17 m to infinity. You don’t have to take my word for it either, everyone at the photowalk saw how much I was enjoying myself… and actually, many of them were apparently really quite enamoured with it too. Like anything in photography though, how useful this lens is in practice is going to come down to the individual photographer. But, the real point is, until recently, there was no 11mm f/2.8 fisheye lens in M-Mount… there is now! The TTArtisan 11mm f/2.8 Fisheye might be imperfect, bonkers and really quite niche, but as an M-Mount photographer, I’m a lot more pleased it exists than I expected to be! Of course, at 11mm, essentially everything in front of you is in frame, so as long as you get the focus right – which again isn’t that hard at anything other than very close focus distances – you can’t really fail just pointing it vaguely in the right direction. Optical quality
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