Category: Skyscape

Backyard Spring Night Sky in New Jersey. Wide Angle Lens Options for Nikon 1 Cameras.

One of the issues I have had with the Nikon 1 “mirrorless” cameras is the lack of wide-angle lens options. The widest angle available with the initial set of lenses was 10 mm f/2.8 prime. This has a 77° field of view (FOV) equivalent to a 27 mm lens on a full-frame (FX) DSLR camera. I like taking wide-angle panorama landscape images when traveling. In order to do this with the Nikon 1 camera requires taking several images and then stitching them together during post-processing. Before going to Norway, I saw a note on the internet that the Olympus FCON-T01 Fisheye converter uses the same 40.5 mm thread that the Nikon 1 10 mm f/2.8 lens uses. The 0.74x adapter increases the FOV to something like 20 mm on a FX DSLR camera. I took this combo with me to Norway, and published an image of Greenland from 36,000 feet using the combo. (19-February-2013).

Since returning from Norway, Nikon released a new wide-angle telephoto lens for Nikon 1 cameras – the 6.7 – 13 mm f/3.5-5.6. At 6.7 mm this lens has a 100° FOV equivalent to a 18 mm lens on a FX DSLR camera. The following three images were taken with the Nikon 1 V2 camera 1) with the 10 mm f/2.8 lens; 2) with the 10 mm f/2.8 lens and the Olympus fish-eye converter; and 3) with the 6.7-13 mm lens at 6.7 mm. The wide-angle image with the 6.7 mm does not have the fish-eye curvature effect. Indeed, when in Norway I found that when I used the Olympus lens I would need to keep the horizon right at the middle of the image. I think that I will be adding the 6.7-13 mm lens to my light-weight travel kit.

Note: Nikon changed the threading on the 6.7-13 mm lens to 52 mm, so I can’t use the Olympus adapter with this lens 😉