TT Artisan 11mm fisheye lens

Yesterday I got my first ever fisheye lens – a TT Artisan 11mm fisheye lens specifically for Canon R lenses. It goes on the R5 perfectly.

I chose to go to Bradford because I wanted a city to walk around on a bright sunny day. Bradford was always going to be quite a busy, wonderful day.

Having never used a fisheye before, I wasn’t too sure what to expect. This lens is totally manual. There are no ways you can set anything up on the camera. You basically put it on the front of the camera and then you’ve got two rings to move. One is a focus ring, the other is an aperture ring. The aperture ring literally changes the size of a hole, and the focus changes the focus. Then you’ve just got to trust the camera that when you press the button it gets it right.

After about five to ten minutes playing with it, I got sharp, well-exposed photographs. One thing I was doing was bracketing, which means I was taking one photo which was roughly what the camera thought it should be, and then one a bit darker, so that if I got a great shot but the photo was too bright, I’d always have the dark one as a fallback position. I do this quite a lot with street photography.

What did we find out? One thing is that you can get low down with this thing and get street markings like bikes or zebra crossings in the foreground and still have lots of real estate in the middle of the photo. This makes for really deep, dramatic shots. I love that you can get really close to things. That is a massive bonus. If you’re stood right next to something quite tall, you can probably get the whole thing in without having to move. But conversely, you have to move close to things to photograph them if you want them big in the frame. So it’s a double-edged sword, really. An example would be the town hall. If you stood a long way away from the town hall, you would end up with very little town hall and lots of surrounding area. You had to walk up to it a little bit. There is a photo I got of a statue of a baby right in front of some 60s buildings, and that is stood right next to it on the grass, and it looks like I’m quite a long way off, but it’s actually almost touching it.

One thing I did try was standing next to something like a zebra crossing light, getting that on the third in focus, and then having a big scene behind it. That was quite a dynamic shot you can’t normally get with normal lenses. It looks okay with a 16mm, but when you get down to 11mm, it takes on a little life of its own.
Also, things like the street maps of Bradford looked quite cool with a little kink in them and bend. The new area of Bradford next to the King George’s Hall and Town Hall, which is pedestrianised now, looks fantastic. There are benches which you can use in the foreground, and the old architecture never fails to impress. Obviously, the Town Hall itself always looks great. Based on a Flemish design, I think it looks very grand, and the trees are very green, so that looks fantastic.

Bradford is the UK City of Culture for 2025, so I captured a sign or two of that around the place. I think that’s why the whole place is bustling with colour and new features. Obviously, there’s the fish and chip shop right in the middle of town, and I went into the shopping area, which again is full of great old buildings. This means you can get far more of the surrounding area than you would normally do with a traditional lens, and all the streets become a bit like the shambles in York because the tops of the buildings start leaning in in a very peculiar way, but it’s quite an effective photo. I noticed if you crop in a little bit, the middle can look fairly normal. To be honest, it looks like it’s got a bit of barrel distortion, but the actual middle of the photo can look like a normal shot.

I did a little bit of street photography, but the problem is if you’re using a 35mm or 40mm normally, you can stand a little bit away from people and still get some great shots. But with this, you have to get right up to people. So basically, you wait until they get fairly close. The great thing about it is that you do have almost infinite depth of field if you get to f11. So it’s worth setting at f11 on aperture priority mode and just banging away as people come past if you want to do that.

All in all, my experience with the 11mm fisheye has been great fun. Looking at the photos now with a fresh pair of eyes a day later, it does actually look quite vibrant and exciting. On a dark day, it wouldn’t look so vibrant, but the fact that you’ve got so much in the frame and everything is a little bit surreal and distorted makes for a very exciting image.
Would I recommend one? Yes! I think for the money I paid for this lens, which wasn’t expensive, you can get an awful lot of value and creativity out of it. One of my main bits of advice to beginner photographers is only buy things which will allow you to do something new and different, especially in the early days. If you upgrade your existing kit, you can do the same things, maybe a bit quicker or sharper. But if you get completely new things, you can do a whole world of difference.

And this is what I found yesterday.

About 1/10th the price of a Canon L Lens too 😉