Good news!  EverydayHDR will now be contributing to HDR Spotting, thanks to Philip Johnson and his gracious registration code.  HDR Spotting has a closed registration by register code only.  Philip was kind enough to throw me his extra one.  You ROCK Philip as does your portfolio!

I recently picked up a very inexpensive 8mm fisheye lens from Amazon.  It is made by Rokinon, don’t let the name fool you, this lens is crazy fun!  It reminds me a bit of my old school days playing with a manual film camera for the first time.  What some may consider a downfall is the inability to set the aperture in camera and no auto-focus, but wait!  Before you disregard it, playing with the lens aperture and focus ring is what photography should be all about.  We are spoiled these days with auto-focus, auto white balance, auto aperture, auto bracketing, auto blah blah blah!  Why not throw down a couple bucks and play with the true nature of Photography.  The manual aspects of this lens will force you to slow down a bit with the camera, take a breather, concentrate, and maybe even help compose better images.  It is just a thought.

Bottom Line: I have not seen a single flaw so far with the lens, I intend on playing with it A LOT, you will see more images in the future!

Here are your Amazon links, oh and buy through my web links if you are interested, I am an Amazon Affiliate now (that means a very small commission)!  Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, Samsung.

Here is my desk, the sticky notes have reproduced since I started EverydayHDR.   My wife told me that it looked like a sticky note factory blew up on it.  You see the Bamboo text, the face of the lens was 9 inches away from that, talk about a killer field of view!  I use the crap out of my Bamboo tablet…can you tell?

I used the lens for 2 of my self portraits on Monday.

Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
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