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Fisheye-Nikkor 8mm f/2.8 (2)
For visual kicks and tricks!
The image circle of projected onto the film with the 8mm Fisheye-Nikkor is 23mm in diameter and just within the 24mm width of the 35mm film frame. I knew I wanted a silhouette type of image and so set the exposure accordingly. I can't remember whether I used any of the lens' built-in filters... all Fisheye-Nikkors are fitted with a built-in filter wheel, the 8mm f/2.8 offering a choice of L1A Skylight, Y48 Yellow, Y52 Deep Yellow, O56 Orange or R60 Red. Whilst all but the Skylight are filters designed primarily for black-and-white films I regularly used them for color photography for very interesting effects!
As I was at the location every day during the working week I shot half-a-dozen frames or so on whatever film I had in my camera at the time (Kodak Tri-X in this instance) and must have re-enacted this scene half-a-dozen times or more before I saw I had a good shot on the dry negative strip in my darkroom. Had anyone been watching me day after day they would have had a laugh at my antics with an umbrella, striding and jumping over my odd looking lens... but that’s how one explores ideas to see if they work of not. After all, you don’t get anywhere by standing still!
I will have a problem illustrating some of my lens features because when I owned several of the optics I didn’t take any images of them... only with them, naturally. Short of grabbing images from other web sites - which I only do if they are the manufacturer’s images (i.e. from the Nikon Inc. Japan site) - I am stuck... but in this instance I searched through my old press cuttings and found a front cover and three pages of editorial from the November 24th 1976 issue of the UK publication “Amateur Photographer” which used nine of my shots from the 8mm Nikkor in a feature I wrote entitled “A-Round Town”. All were taken in and around St. James’ Park, Queen Victoria’s monument in front of Buckingham Palace (cover), the Horse Guards Parade, Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square. The latter image in Trafalgar Square depicting a pigeon flying close to a tourist’s head was also used on the front cover of at least one edition of Herb Keppler’s “The Nikon, Nikkormat Way” published by Focal Press.
Part of what I wrote in that issue of the AP included...
"Nature can be made to grow unnaturally and more strikingly, and hungry pigeons can be seen to zoom in from every corner of the sky, caught by the magic all-seeing eye of this lens.
Apart from the excitement of natural colors seen in the circular view, others can be added by turning the built-in filter wheel... Color can be added faster than a cloud obscuring the sun, and the effects are near shattering - sunset at midday, yellows, oranges, reds creating extraterrestrial effects. It is also possible to get more effects by dialing-in only half of the color filter, so that the color wash tints only the sky leaving the ground it’s natural color..."
I have never seen the above trick described anywhere else... but it works, as can be seen on the AP cover thumbnail shot above.
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