So I kept seeing other people doing fisheye shots. (Notably YOU, Julie Oldfield.) And I kept saying "I have to git me one of them there lenses." Yes, true, I do have the lens cap fish eye, and while it can be fun to use it really is a toy. I see some of the shots that I took of the interior of the Galleria Umberto I in Napoli using that lens, sigh, and think "If only I'd had a real one."

Of course I sigh even more loudly when I think that those shots were taken over 5 years ago now and I have no idea when or (I refuse to say "if" yet) I shall ever see that building again, but that's a different conversation.

However good fisheyes are expensive, and have no value as general purpose lenses; they're very much special duty lenses. Olympus / OM has one, just one in its range. 8mm, f/1.8. I had had my eye on it for a while, but the price, always the price.

Then just before Christmas one local camera place advertised it for several hundred dollars off. To add to that, Olympus / OM has a cashback of $100. The time, it had come.

It has been raining relentlessly for the better part of 2 weeks. The grass is about shoulder height but the ground has been too wet to mow, but today we had one, just one day of sunny respite.

I am still restricted in how much exercise I'm supposed to do each day but I decided that it was long past time to get back to an abbreviated morning walk, and since I wasn't going that far I decided to try out my new toy. In reality... this probably would have been better half an hour earlier when the sun was lower on the horizon, but then I would have been sitting around in my car for half an hour waiting for the coffee shop to open for breakfast.

The thing I noted from this morning is that you can get incredibly different results by just moving a few metres in, or up and down a bit.

I can see myself having a bunch of fun with this in the coming months to years.

Some of which I hope to be inside grand buildings in Italia, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.