Fisheye

A fisheye bends every straight line in the frame into a curve and takes in almost everything in front of the camera. The room arrives as a bubble with the subject swelling at its centre.

The distortion is the content. A fisheye says the view is not a neutral one, which is why it attaches so easily to subjectivity, to comedy and to anything unstable.

Fisheyes are curvilinear by design. A rectilinear ultra wide fights to keep lines straight, and a fisheye stops fighting, which is how it reaches 180 degrees of view.

There are two kinds. A circular fisheye projects a round image inside a black frame, around 8mm on full frame. A full frame fisheye fills the rectangle and measures around 15mm or 16mm. Say which one you want.

Bending needs something to bend. Horizons, door frames, table edges and floorboards all curve visibly. An open sky and a blank wall show nothing at all.

Use it for skate and action footage, for a peephole or a security camera, for comic exaggeration, and for a point of view that should feel wrong.

Avoid it for anything that has to look observed instead of authored. The lens is loud and it never stops announcing itself.

A 14mm ultra wide is rectilinear. It stretches the corners and keeps straight lines straight, so a doorway stays a doorway.

Look at the horizon. Straight means ultra wide. Bowed means fisheye. That one line answers it.

Robbie Ryan shot parts of The Favourite (2018) on an extreme fisheye, and the bowed palace corridors make the court look like a fishbowl the characters cannot leave. Poor Things (2023) uses the same distortion to hold the audience inside a point of view that has not settled yet.

The model returns a wide shot with mild edge stretch, which is an ultra wide and not a fisheye. Say straight lines bowed outward and name the lines that bow.

The other failure is a fisheye pointed at nothing. Put a horizon, a corridor or a doorway in the frame, or the distortion has nothing to act on and the shot looks ordinary.