This is how an image with this lens should look.
I believe it’s important to admit to our mistakes, that it’s a big part of how we learn and grow. And so this is my time to admit to you what is a slightly embarrassing mistake on my part. It’s the sort of very simple mistake you’d think I’d no longer make. And yet… here we are. 😁
I’d decided to take a single lens, my Opteka 6.5 mm Fisheye lens, out for a hike through the woods and see if I could learn to better see through this focal length and perspective. What’s funny is the entire time I kept thinking something just isn’t right with the photos I’m creating. And yet I didn’t figure out what until we were almost at the end of our hike. That’s when I realized the black bars on the left and right side of EVERY SINGLE photo I created were caused by the incorrectly attached lens hood! I’d spent the entire day shooting with the lens hood on SIDEWAYS, creating these vertical black bars to the left and right of each and every photo. And let me tell you, I felt pretty stupid when I realized what I’d done. But I also had a good laugh about it. These things do happen. They key is learning from them.
An incorrectly installed lens hood can be seen by the lens. That’s what the black bars are on each side.
Making the best of a bad situation, I can simply crop the photo into a square format. 😁
This sort of problem is very unlikely to happen with most of the lenses from major manufacturers. They tend to build lens hoods that only snap on in the correct orientation. But this lens was not from a major manufacturer. It was a very low cost fisheye lens, something to let me dabble in fisheye photography without the much larger costs from the big brands. Fisheye photography isn’t something I do often so I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it enough to warrant the higher cost. But sometimes you do get what you pay for, and opting for lower cost alternatives can come with compromises in quality. In this case it came with a lens hood that can be snapped in place just as easily sideways as it can correctly.
I’ve included some photos to give an idea of what it looks like and why it’s a problem. The 6.5 mm fisheye lens is such a wide angle it can almost see around corners. The camera’s sensor is rectangular and in a horizontal orientation. So the correct way to install the lens hood is with the larger petal shapes on the top and bottom, where the sensor is longer and there’s more space above and below it, and the smaller ones on the sides where the sensor is shorter and closer to the edge of the frame. This will properly provide a (very) small amount of shade and not obstruct the sensor. But putting the lens hood on sideways causes the vertical bars on the left and right and turns the photo into something closer to a square.
Here’s the lens hood that, frustratingly, can be installed incorrectly just as easily as correctly.
This shows the lens hood incorrectly attached to the lens. Notice the vertical black bars on the left and right where the wider petals of the lens hood shade the sides of the lens. Because the camera sensor is rectangular and oriented horizontally, these shaded regions will be seen by the sensor and turn into black bars in your photos.
Here I’ve correctly attached the lens hood, with the larger petals at the top and bottom. Notice the darker bars now create a horizontal rectangular shape that matches the sensor in the camera, so the lens hood doesn’t obstruct anything or appear in the image.
So one of the lessons here might be to better learn your gear, its strengths and weaknesses, and how best to deal with them. And if you have a strange feeling that something just isn’t right maybe put a little extra time into trying to figure out why instead of just continuing on as you are. Maybe you’ll find the incorrectly attached lens hood faster than I did and end up with fewer obstructed photos.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at a slightly embarrassing mistake I made. And perhaps it’ll be enough to keep you from making a similar mistake.
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