Self portrait on a bicycle

The Lumix G 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens is fun to use, due to it's extremely wide perspective. This type of lenses are commonly used in extreme sports videos, like skateboard and BMX. I don't do this type of things myself, but I figured I could use the lens to record myself bicycling anyway.

To do this, I attached the Panasonic GH2 camera to the front fork of the bicycle. I used a Manfrotto Super Clamp, which is essentially a clamp with a tripod head attachment stud. To be able to attach the camera, I also used a tripod ball head, and I chose the Benro BH0, which is pretty compact. After putting it on my bicycle, it looks like this:

Here's the video I recorded:



I prefocused at about 50cm, and set the camera to Manual Focus (MF) before starting the video recording. This was done to avoid focus hunting during the video. The 8mm fisheye lens focuses very quickly, but still, I wanted to avoid short periods of out of focus footage.

I think the colours look a bit dull in this video. It was a somewhat dull day, but still, I think that the next time, I will increase the colour saturation setting before using this lens for videos.

Self portrait with a fisheye lens

Most of what I write in this blog is non-personal. While the technical analysis is generally based on fairly objective observations, it is supplemented with subjective comments. But it's still far from personal.

With this post, I take a turn towards the more personal side with a self portrait:

It was taken with the Lumix G 8mm f/3.5 fisheye lens. It has an amazingly short minimum focus distance of 0.1 meter. This is measured from the sensor, which means that the distance from the front lens element is around 2cm, or approximately one inch. The field of view is still very wide, so it cannot be called a macro lens. Here is one example where I used the lens to photograph a LEGO figure up close.

At this distance from my face, the perspective gets very distorted. You can see this in the self portrait, since my nose and eye looks enormous compared to the rest of the face. Of course, the fisheye lens is far from what you would call a portrait lens.

To get as much as possible in focus, I set the aperture to f/9. There was still enough light to get a shutter speed of 1/20 second at ISO320.

Composing the image was fairly easy. I could just flip out the LCD screen on the Panasonic Lumix GH2 and see how the resulting image would be, while holding the lens towards my eye. I used autofocus, which is very fast with this lens, even at this close distance.