Nikon 8-15mm Fisheye Lens: Sample Images and Real-World Shooting Notes

The Nikon AF-S 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED fisheye zoom lens certainly isn’t for every situation. As a fisheye zoom lens, it’s very much a niche piece of kit. It’s not the only zoom fisheye out there — Canon has one similar (albeit with a constant maximum aperture, whereas this Nikon version has a variable maximum aperture that’s tied to the zoom), and there are a few other options available, even for Nikon mounts, but they’re few and far between and well outside the mainstream.

I’ve covered Nikon’s 16mm f/2.8 fisheye lens for full-frame cameras and used Nikon’s 10.5mm f/2.8 for DX cropped-sensor DSLRs. Both of those are prime lenses that create fisheye views that fill the frame.

Something that sets this lens apart from many other fisheye lenses, including Nikon’s other fisheye lenses, is the zoom. When used on a full-frame DSLR (i.e., one of Nikon’s FX DSLRs), when zoomed in, it fills the entire frame. Zoomed out, it creates a fully circular image in the center surrounded by black. I have some practical examples of the fisheye zoom range here. (The effect is different on a DX body: at 8mm the image circle doesn’t quite cover the frame, so you get dark corners, and the frame only fills completely from around 11mm. At 15mm you’re looking at roughly a 22mm field of view in 35mm-equivalent terms.)

If the frame-filling fisheye is a niche option, the zoomed-out circular fisheye is even more so. There are several examples of the zoom range below, and I’ve also posted some examples separately.

It’s also an autofocus lens — some of the other zoom fisheyes are manual focus.

I’ve also written a detailed hands-on review of this lens, with much more on using it and how it performs. These sample images are designed to complement that review.

These were all taken with a Nikon D850. You can click on each image for a full-size version. They were all shot in RAW and processed in Lightroom, but I haven’t applied any post-processing optical corrections such as adding extra sharpness or reducing distortion, vignetting, or chromatic aberration.

Things worth knowing about the Nikon 8-15mm fisheye lens

Lens Hood. The lens comes with a lens hood, and it comes into play when zooming. That’s because when you zoom out, the lens hood comes into view through the frame with some drastic vignetting. Like this (you can even see the ridges of the inside of the hood at the bottom and sides):

So you’ll want to remove the lens hood to get that circle-shaped fisheye view.

Full Frame / APS Sensor. I shot all of the examples on this page with a Nikon D850. The lens will work on an APS-C cropped sensor camera, but the effective focal lengths will be 1.5x what you see here — in other words, a tighter crop.

The one thing you can’t do on a DX body is the circular fisheye. Even at 8mm the image circle is bigger than the short side of a DX frame, so the top and bottom of the circle get cropped off while the corners still go dark — not a clean round image. For a full circle on APS-C you’d need something closer to a 5.5mm fisheye.

One more compatibility note, since this is an F-mount lens designed for DSLRs. It also works on Nikon’s Z-mount mirrorless bodies through the FTZ or FTZ II adapter — AF-S lenses like this one are fully supported by the adapter, autofocus included — so the coverage rules above still apply: a full circular image at 8mm on a full-frame Z body, and a clipped circle with dark corners on a DX body like the Z50. I haven’t shot this lens on a Z body myself; everything here was taken on the D850.

Optical correction tools

I deliberately haven’t applied extensive corrections to these images. And the general rule of thumb in photography is that it’s better to get the shot right at the time of capture rather than trying to fix it after. That’s a great aspiration, but it’s not always possible to do if you’re bumping up against limitations or flaws in gear, conditions, or technique.

But it’s worth mentioning that there are some excellent tools available to help address common issues with lenses, such as distortion, chromatic aberration, and lens vignetting when editing the images. All-round image processing apps like Lightroom Classic and Capture One have solid tools built in already that often cater to specific lens profiles (or you can make your own).

Some more specialized tools can take it even further. DxO, in particular, sets the gold standard. Their software is built on the foundation of their incredibly deep archive of data from their extensive lab testing of the optical performance of lenses and cameras. But there are some other excellent specialized tools available. These are well worth a look (and have free trials):

• DxO Pure RAW (for a suite of automatic RAW file corrections enhancement)
• DxO ViewPoint (correcting for distortion and geometry)
• Topaz Labs Sharpen AI (in addition to standard unsharp tools, includes focus correction and shake reduction)
• On1 NoNoise (includes Tack Sharp AI, which applies sharpening)

Accessories for the Nikon fisheye 8-15mm lens

Lens Hood. This lens comes with its own, dedicated lens hood. The model number is HB-80.

Lens Cap. The lens cap is, again, a dedicated model for this lens. It attaches with a combination of slipping over the front and snapping into place.

Its model number is LC-K102.

One quirk of the design: the cap slips over the HB-80 hood rather than onto the front of the lens, so hood and cap come off together in a single movement. That’s convenient in normal use, but it’s worth remembering when you’ve pulled the hood off to shoot the circular fisheye at 8mm.

Filters. This lens isn’t compatible with most traditional filters on the market. Because of the curved front element, there’s no way to attach glass filters to the front of the lens.

That doesn’t mean filters are completely off the table. Like some of Nikon’s other fisheye and ultra-wide lenses, this one has a small slot behind the rear element that takes 27x29mm gelatin filters, so a color or ND gel goes in at the back rather than on the front. It’s fiddly, and you’ll usually need to trim the gel to fit, but the option is there.

A polarizer wouldn’t help much here even if you could mount one. The polarizing effect depends on the angle to the sun, and across a 180° view that angle changes enormously from one side of the frame to the other, so you’d get a dark band across part of the sky and almost no effect in the rest of it. That’s true of any very wide lens, but with a fisheye it’s unavoidable.

Where to find it new or used

Nikon launched this lens in 2017 — it was the first NIKKOR fisheye with a zoom — and has since wound down its F-mount DSLR system. The lens itself has been discontinued, so new copies are getting hard to find — Nikon USA has listed it as a refurbished item, and several dealers now show it as discontinued.

On the used market, it’s still in pretty high demand, but I do see them come available fairly regularly (but get in quick, because they often get snapped up quickly!)