Though probably not as much as Chris Halford, I love my fisheye. I primarily shoot wide, and the 180 degrees perspective that my Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens provides me is about as wide as I can possibly need from a lens. Before breaking the bank to buy it, however, I first looked into buying a Lomography Fisheye camera. It is definitely cheaper than a dedicated lens, but the downside for me was the film factor. Shooting digital is just oh-so economical.

Anyway, luck would have it that my girlfriend came back from another thrift-store scavenger hunt with a broken $2 Lomography Fisheye in hand!

The broken Fisheye.

The broken Fisheye.

I was really looking forward to digitizing this, so I couldn’t be more ecstatic and promptly tore it apart to remove the lens…

I found an article online from someone that has already adapted the Fisheye camera lens to fit his Canon SLR, and so this task suddenly became easier.

Taking apart the camera couldn’t be simpler. After removing a few screws, and an outer ring on the front of the lens, the body halves, freeing you to remove a few more screws to ultimately detach the lens. After that it was only a matter of cutting excess plastic and shaving some of the back of the plastic housing (slowly) with a dremel to enable it to focus to infinity when mounted on a Nikon.

Needless destruction!

Needless destruction!

The biggest hurdle was then figuring out how to securely fasten it on a native Nikon mount so it can be attached and removed like a regular lens. This thing is composed of really cheap plastic and cannot be securely fastened by screws. I have experimented with a macro ring adaptor from Nikon as well as an M42-to-Nikon adaptor, but have not yet decided on how best to secure it.

The LOMO Fisheye lens, shown in its future resting place.

The LOMO Fisheye lens, shown in its future resting place.

It's a beautiful thing.

It's a beautiful thing.

Now that I have all the hard work out of the way, permanently mounting it to a Nikon adaptor is all that remains until this bad boy has a place in my camera bag.

Want to try this yourself? Unless you have money to burn, be sure to buy a broken Fisheye cam (with an undamaged lens being the only requirement!) for cheap on eBay or scour local thrift stores. Check eBay as well for cheap mount adaptors for your brand of camera to which you can wedge in the Fisheye lens. Also, the lens cannot be focused and has no aperture settings, but everything is pretty much in focus anyway when shooting with this.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I describe how to adapt this lens for your camera.

Links of interest:

Thanks for reading!