I might use a software like that when I get a more powerful camera that is worth the effort. My old one has just 4 megapixels. That’s good enough for me righ now, and I have to scale images down and reduce resolution before I can put them online anyhow. Once bandwidth and server space are cheap and plentiful enough that I can put images up without serious down editing I’ll finally replace it and think about more fance effects. In the meantime I am experimenting with HDR, and again using pretty small images.

BTW, have you seen this pano sofware? Not the same as fisheye but produces an interesting result. The free demo works great in my experience.

The advantage of the fisheye lens is that you can capture a much wider view than with a regular lens. In the case of the pictures in this thread, it is a camera with 170 degree angle from left to right. Because it is a cheap camera that uses film (now that takes me way back), I can’t zoom with it; that’s why the pictures are cut off on top and bottom. The best I can do is to look for the sweet spot in any given location, where I can make the most of the wide angle and keep fisheye distortion at a minimum. Mostly, I use the fisheye camera for capturing a whole vista, distortions and all, so I have a picture that shows how the buildings are located in respect to each other. After that, I take detailed pictures of the buildings with my digital camera.

What I do like about the pictures here is the color and the lighting. I couldn’t capture that in quite the same way with my old Canon. I case of the top most image, I also wouldn’t have pointed a digital camera at the evening sun, for fear of damaging the sensor.

For the pictures in the other thread, I used a door viewer with a 200 degree angle lens that I held in front of my digital camera. It’s kind of a kludge, but it works well enough, as long as it is sunny weather.

You have probably noticed that Glenn Reynolds also uses a fish eye lens, but he must have edited them some before posting them. He uses this pretty expensive one, and that also is a lot more versatile than the stuff I use.