Olympus 9mm f/8.0 Fisheye Body Cap Lens

Birds do it, bees do it - even educated fleas do it. Let's do it! Let's have a look at the Olympus 9mm f/8.0 Fisheye Body Cap Lens. It's a novelty lens sold by Olympus for the Micro Four Thirds system. It doubles as a fisheye lens and as a lens cap body cap. It's not a lens cap, is it? It has a lens cap. It's a body cap. It's a lens that doubles as a body cap.

As a body cap it's so-so, but as a fisheye lens it's surprisingly good, especially given that it costs less than a hundred English pounds. It looks like this:

Now, I get no kick from champagne - mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all - but what I do enjoy is stretching out fisheye images with software. The end result is a very wide field of view albeit with blurry edges. Here are some images taken with a fisheye lens that have been stretched out with software:

Ultrawide images do something to me, something that simply mystifies me. I think it's because I grew up with 3D video games, and I'm used to vanishing point perspective and blocky shapes.

The images above were all shot with a Canon 5D, a heavy full-frame SLR using a full-frame fisheye lens, but what if there was a lighter, smaller option? Such as for example the Olympus 9mm fisheye body cap? What if it existed, which it does?

Some of the ceilings of the Doge's Palace, taken with this lens, using the E-PL1's right-angle viewfinder.

Furthermore I've long been curious about the Micro Four Thirds system, and used examples of the early twelve megapixel bodies have come down in price, so here we are. The Micro Four Thirds system has a limited number of ultrawide lenses, and so the 9mm fisheye body cap can be used as a left-field choice if you want pocket-sized ultrawide coverage in that format.

It has to be said that if you crop off off the outer 20% of the image the fisheye effect is greatly diminished. You end up with something that's still very wide and more than large enough for Instagram. If you use the camera's JPG engine to crop the images square, eliminating the left and right sides entirely, landscapes barely look fisheye at all:

The 9mm fisheye is sold as a novelty. It's not listed in the "lens" section of the company's website, instead it's buried away in the "accessories" section. The optical elements are made out of glass rather than plastic, and the image quality is legitimately, genuinely good - not fuzzy like a Holga. for example. In fact the lens is surprisingly delightful, delicious, delectable, skip a few, de-lovely.

Mechanically it's really simple. The aperture is fixed at f/8 and it only has three focusing positions, of which infinity and the middle position are essentially the same. If you push the focus lever past infinity a sliding cap covers the tiny front element. The overall arrangement reminds me a bit of the old Olympus XA, with its sliding cover and pushy-pully rangefinder lever.

EXIF? No, but given that it's always 9mm and always f/8 that's not a big loss. In-body image stabilisation? Only if you enable it manually, and I didn't bother.

The Teatro Olimpico in Vincenza, which has an early example of forced perspective.

In olden days the idea of composing at f/8 was looked on as something shocking, but with a gain-boosted electronic viewfinder it's relatively simple. With electronic viewfinders you could say that anything goes, although sadly the E-PL1 doesn't have an electronic spirit level.

Cole Porter didn't write any songs about computerised perspective correction, but if he had done so this paragraph would have some lyrics from one of those songs. The pictures below illustrate three options open to the fisheye photographer. The first image hasn't been corrected at all. As you can see it has the bulged look of fisheye images.

In the following image the distortion has been corrected, which cuts off some of the left and right sides but still leaves a very wide field of view.

The final image has been corrected for perspective as well, so that it looks a bit like Doom, but without hellslime or imps etc:

The results aren't pretty up-close, but very few things are pretty up-close.

Shot from a train coming home from Feltre, north-east Italy. The 9mm fisheye would probably be very good for action sports videos - BASE jumping, paragliding and stuff like that.

In my experience fisheye lenses tend to be extremely sharp in the middle. There's something deep in the heart of them, that's really a part of them, that goes over my head but probably has something to do with a relatively simple lens construction and a total lack of geometric correction, and also massive depth of field.

The four images below demonstrate central sharpness, which is very good. They've been stretched, but not sharpened, and there's no noise reduction. The original files are 12mp. The E-PL1 has a 12mp sensor that was ubiquitous during the early years of Micro Four Thirds.

With a bit of sharpening they would really take off. In the middle of the last picture is the MS Sirena, which first set sail in 1999 and allows 800 people to tick Dubrovnik and Venice off their bucket list. In the photograph above it's just about to sail past San Giorgio Maggiore to parts east.

On a complete tangent, if you're at the top of San Giorgio Maggiore's bell tower and a cruise liner sails by, and you're carrying a Canon 300mm f/4 IS, it looks like this:

You and I babe / we'll be riding high, babe / every care is gone / from this moment on

Isn't it great that the liner has a huge television screen? That way the passengers will always have something to look at. But I digress.

How does the Olympus 9mm compare with full-frame fisheye lenses? In terms of wideness it's on a par with a full-frame 15-16mm fisheye, such as the popular Zenitar. As with all the fisheye lenses I have used the big issue is colour fringing at the edges of the image, both purple and multi-coloured. This can be fixed with software, preferably before you stretch out the image (otherwise you stretch out the colour fringing as well and it becomes massive), although purple fringing is harder and involves fiddling with the hue and saturation controls. Beyond that, the only thing full-frame lenses really gain is speed - most of them open up to f/2.8 or so. It's easy to handhold fisheye images and if you're a perfectionist you'll be using a tripod with a spirit level, so speed isn't a huge advantage.

The other big issue with fisheye images is dynamic range. If you're outdoors the image will have a lot of sky, and you can't use graduated filters because fisheye lenses bulge out. You could in theory use filters with the Olympus 9mm, but it doesn't have a filter thread. I imagine it wouldn't be hard to Jerry-build one, although given the tiny front element I surmise that a graduated filter would need a very sharp dividing line. I could be wrong.

This raises the question of whether I could use this lens plus a Micro Four Thirds body as a dedicated fisheye camera, to which the answer is probably yes, although the E-PL1 is behind the curve. It's almost a decade old. ISO 1600 is grainy albeit that colour noise is low, and frustratingly the E-PL1 doesn't have any kind of remote shutter release and only brackets by a stop each way. I'll write more about the E-PL1 at some point.

In summary the 9mm fisheye body cap is surprisingly good. It's a lot better than the conceptually similar 3.2mm fisheye for the Pentax Q system, optically not quite as good as the Samyang 7.5mm f/3.5, but a lot cheaper. And it's a body cap as well! The mind boggles.

The Bramante Staircase, Vatican Museum

Today hello let's going to have a look we're The Bramante Staircase, although it's not actually the actual staircase; the actual Bramante Staircase was built in the early 1500s by Donato Bramante but isn't publicly-accessible whereas the thing that everybody calls the Bramante Staircase (not the real thing) was built in the 1930s by a chap called Giuseppe Momo, no relation, so I suppose technically it should be called the Momo Staircase (real thing), but there's already a museum called the MOMO and it would confuse people.

The not-really Bramante Staircase is in the Vatican Museum, which is where I was. I went there. I was there. I knew about the staircase and decided to photograph it with the Peleng 8mm fisheye lens covered in this post here, because the staircase is a big swirly enclosed thing that lends itself to a fisheye lens.

I'm a man! As a consequence the staircase's enormous symbolic value immediately jumped out at me because it's basically feminine, isn't it? It's a gigantic vagina. I explored its smooth walls; a man and his camera, sucked into the spiralling feminine vortex.

If I was in charge of the Vatican I would fill a bunch of barrels with pig's blood and pour them down the Bramante Staircase so that all of the visitors using the stairs would arrive at the bottom screaming and covered in blood, as if they had been born again. Some of the older tourists would die of heart attacks but that's okay because women are lethal. This post isn't going to be like the others because I'm taking more painkillers than usual.

The Bramante Staircase is duplex - it's essentially a pair of staircases arranged in a double helix, so that people going upstairs don't have to pass by people going downstairs. Catholics probably understand why. I'm not Catholic. Probably something to do with sin.

Unfortunately the uphill staircase is blocked off, so the whole thing is just a big waste of time and money. Giuseppe Momo is probably turning in his grave, but he did get paid (hopefully) and that's what matters. It would not be the only thing in Italy or indeed the world that doesn't work and was created entirely so that money could be transferred from one institution to another.

Kids are like that. Parents have kids purely so they can qualify for a council house, or so they can parade them on Instagram for "likes". The kids themselves are just a means to an end; no-one cares about them. Kids get to have their revenge when they grow up, but by that time their parents are senile old dead people, so instead they take out their rage on their kids, and ultimately the world is just a series of people trying to scratch their itch by taking revenge on blameless victims. And yet humanity continues, and will continue, so on a fundamental level it works.

NB There are other parts of the museum. Not just a staircase. It's quite big. I'm not a huge fan of classical art; the artists were commissioned to illustrate a narrow range of topics, either to impress the plebs or make the clergy feel good about themselves; the context is so distant as to be unknowable to contemporary audiences, with the result that the original meaning of the art is lost; if I approach the relics in a post-modern death of the author sense it still doesn't work because classical art is frustratingly straight.

I learn that the ancient Greeks believed erections were caused by an accumulation of air within the penis, a view challenged by Leonardo Da Vinci, who after dissecting a man who had been hanged came to the conclusion that erections were actually maintained by blood. Surprisingly for something of enormous vital importance the physiology of erections wasn't fully understood until the 1980s.

Entry is €17. There was no queue whatsoever when I arrived. Although the main entrance is signposted for tour groups only, it's the main entrance for everybody. You have to put your bag through a metal detector. When I was there the ticket counters didn't accept cards, so just in case I advise bringing some old-fashioned physical currency. There is at least one small cafe. I had a coffee, which was unexceptional, shown here with a spoon because I crave a measure of control over my life:

I have no sentimental illusions about Italy. The country has been gouging tourists for literally thousands of years. I imagine the modern Italians are irritated that so many people come to see the rubble of their past, as if modern Italy had nothing to offer; except of course it does have a lot to offer, e.g. pizza, nice scenery. The Vatican Museum(s) has(ve) an assembly line please-move-along quality. I found myself sandwiched between several tour groups, unable to break out of the trap, but isn't that true of life in general? We're boxed in by strangers in an unfamiliar environment, unable to break out.

I think I've finally calmed down. The museum has some contemporary works, linked by the theme of Christianity, although sadly Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles was absent. Because he is a modern Christ. The Jackson family gave him to the world, but smashed his sword before they threw him into the arena, and we watched him die.