Has anybody heard of these fish bowl lenses i think they are called that u can put on the camera to give a cool looking effect? I am looking for one of these for my movie. If anybody knows where i could find one, that would be excellent.
I don't think they'd fit on a camcorder, Jesse. You could have one custom fit but where will you find that around here?
I think you're talking about a fisheye lens. Try looking that up.
Fisheye it is. Remember the scene in "Hot shots", when the guy looks Topper over in the barracks? Same effect.
Also pretty much any Busta Rhymes video in the late 90s uses the fisheye lens. The video director (Hype Williams IIRC) used fisheye as his trademark style for several years.
Actually a fisheye lens would have a mount specific to the camera. If you do not have a unit with an interchangeable lens and a thousand dollars or more you probably want a fisheye or wide-angle converter which will cost you much less (should be able to get a good one for less than $100). The things you want to pay attention to are mounting thread size and magnification. The mounting thread size corresponds to the filter size your camera lens takes; although some converters are designed to take an adapter ring to fit your filter size. The magnification is expressed as a decimal value and you do not want anything greater than a .42x magnification (for comparison purposes a .42x converter used on a 50mm lens for a 35mm film camera would give the equivalent of a 21mm lens). If you want a wider lens, you could go with a greater magnificaton down to .25x or use the converter on a wide angle lens. The problem with this, however, is that the frame corners will darken, be cut off, or you will have a circular image. The studios and photographers use a specialized fisheye lens that effectively permits a full frame image to be taken with a very wide perspective, but are very expensive. A .42x converter on a normal lens will generally provide a full frame but also give bending of lines of perspective especially toward the edges of the frame. The best place I can recommend for you to get either a lens or a converter is B&H Photo Video. You might want to give eBay a try as I have found good deals on lenses on eBay. One final note; even though the manufacturers of the converters might suggest that there is no light loss with converter, it is still a good idea to calculate you exposure at one half a stop less. I hope I have provided some useful information.Bob