5 frames with a Pentax Q7 & Fisheye lens in the library

My wife is doing an open university course, so around once a month during her academic year, we end up taking a trip to the library to collect some books. It’s become a bit of a ritual where we take the kid, who has a hot chocolate from the cafe and we walk up to the top floor to search for the books Hannah’s picked online. Quite often she likes to have an extra mooch whilst she’s there for other potentially useful books too. At which point, I take the opportunity to take out a camera out and grab a few snaps.

We are quite lucky in Worcester, we have an incredible library. It’s shared between the university and general public, so it’s bigger than average for a city of our size. It’s also something of an architectural wonder. Oddly, a lot of people sneer at it. Personally, I take the view that even if you don’t like the design of it, it should still be possible to be impressed with it. There’s some pictures and a video about it here.

It’s also impressive on the inside. I don’t suppose it’s possible to build a structure like that without the inside also looking really interesting. It spans 5 floors in total I think, with the main areas of the building spread over 3 main floors of books and workspace. There’s loads of interesting angles and shapes to photograph, many of which I have explored in the past. Actually these days, when I take photos in there, I more often find myself interested in taking snaps of the kid and my wife. I guess through repetition and familiarity I’ve become a little blind to the impressive building I’m in. That said, it does always offer lots of opportunity for leading lines and other useful compositional elements.

This most recent visit, I decided – as I often do at the moment – to take my Pentax Q7. I hadn’t really shot the fisheye lens in anger yet, and decided I fancied shooting it in the library to take advantage of some of the aforementioned compositional features. With the kid in tow, she was going to be my main subject.

The Pentax Q fisheye is quite a slow lens at f/5.6, and the library is only well lit in certain places. Because of this, I decided to crank the ISO up to 6400 and lock it there. The Q7 is pretty noisy at this high ISO, but I don’t mind the noise especially when it’s converted to black and white. I have also really enjoyed shooting black and white recently – especially with this camera – so I was quite happy to commit to the idea of a higher ISO look similar to how I did when I took it out before Christmas.

I ended up taking quite a few photos, though a lot of them were spoiled by banding. This is a property of the electronic shutter that the Q7 uses with the “Toy” series lenses – of which the fisheye is one – and the type of lighting in there. I found it wasn’t a problem at all shutter speeds, but the combination of trying to help find books, look after Norah, and take photos was too much for my brain to work out which shutter speeds caused the effect to happen. So I just attempted to work around it by taking multiple frames. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

I ended up with 6 photos that I was happy with that pretty much tell the story of our trips to the library I think. I’m no regular user of fisheye lenses, but I think I managed to harness this one to ok effect on this occasion. Helped, I’m pretty certain, by all the leading lines that I mentioned the library so kindly provides.

I took the fisheye on holiday with me too, but as you might have recently read I didn’t end up using it. I will make use of it again though. It feels like almost the perfect fisheye lens for me. I don’t need a “proper” one for the sort of photos I will ever likely take – a cheap “toy” one does me just fine.

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