Harry Styles just released his new album with a cover photo taken with a fisheye lens. This video shows how the fisheye lens was created and adopted by musicians and producers in different eras.
Throughout the decades since the first Nikon consumer 8mm fisheye lens was released, musicians were captured with this lens: distorted images, and the distortion of the electric guitars at first, and then later as the hip hop genre became a phenomenon, the item or person photographed visually becoming larger than life and not so square. When used in music videos, this strange viewpoint created humor, but also a fantasy world where the artists were unique, moving, and shaped differently, which allowed them to create these worlds for the viewer.
What I enjoyed learning was the fact that the lens was really designed to view the world like a fish would and that this fascination and imaginative approach became something they used during the moon landing.
I'm not sure Harry Styles considered this historical nature of the lens when he decided to use a fisheye on his album cover, but I like the fact that we get to view a short historical lesson about the lens because he did.
I am not usually one to snap on my fisheye lens, although it's always been fun to do so. Do you use a fisheye lens, and if so, do you do it for professional work or for your personal images?
