BUYING A FISHEYE LENS MIGHT HAVE BEEN A BAD IDEA
What the World Looks Like to a Halloween Monster (or Someone Silly Enough to Buy a Fisheye)
There is a fine line between high-concept artistic vision and the sudden, creeping realisation that you have spent good money on an optic essentially designed to bend reality until it snaps.
Buying an ultra-wide fisheye zoom is one of those impulsive gear decisions that sounds brilliant on paper. In your head, you imagine dynamic architectural sweeps, immersive environmental records, and bold, experimental street frames. Then you take it out onto the pavement, look through the viewfinder, and confront the unvarnished truth: unless you intend to shoot a 1990s skateboarding video or survey the inside of a drainage culvert, the lens makes the ordinary world look completely unhinged.
Straight kerbstones melt into crescent moons, vertical brick facades lean inwards like looming precipices, your own shoes constantly threaten to hijack the lower third of the composition, and anything further than six feet away recedes into an insignificant pinpoint on the horizon.
Yet, standing on Henrietta Place in the dying days of October, the madness of the glass finally found its spiritual home. If you ever wondered what the city looks like from the perspective of an ankle-high goblin or a bewildered Halloween monster sizing up Dublin 1, this is it.
The View from the Gutter: Municipal Dublin Through Bent Glass
At hip height, the lens strips Dublin's familiar street furniture of its rectilinear sobriety, turning civic notices into a carnival funhouse:
The Squeezed Sanctuary of Henrietta Place: Crouched beside the boundary railings of the residential flats, the council’s cheerful orange banner advertising the "Halloween Spooktacular" beside the Fruit and Veg Market looks less like a friendly neighbourhood invitation and more like a glowing portal into another realm. The vertical railings curve outwards like the ribs of an iron trap, while the bats, cartoon tombstones, and grinning pumpkins swell grotesquely towards the front element.
The Looming Decree on the Corner: Move a few paces along the curve towards the corner hoarding, and the council’s warning sign takes on the proportions of an apocalyptic warning. "Stay Safe This Halloween in the North West Inner City" billows outward like a sail in a gale. The cartoon blood drips and the startled black cat loom disproportionately large, while the solid Georgian brickwork of the terrace behind leans precariously backwards, as if retreating from the sheer visual punch of the municipal hotline.
A Step Function in the City: The Uncanny Quiet of 2026
For those of us living on Henrietta Place and Henrietta Street, the final week of October has historically meant locking the front door, battening down the hatches, and bracing for the inevitable fallout of rogue bonfires, screaming fireworks, and the very real prospect of structural property damage. It was a seasonal siege.
Yet this year has brought a genuine step function: an unexpected, round-the-clock calm. The familiar daylight precursors—the dragging of stolen shipping pallets through cobbled lanes, the rattles of shopping trolleys loaded with timber, and the concussive daylight explosions echoing off Georgian brickwork—have simply failed to materialise.
The sudden collapse of this street ritual stems from several converging factors:
The Squeeze on Mail-Order Imports: For years, informal sellers and curious youths sourced cheap parcels of pyrotechnics and novelty accessories directly from vendors outside the European Union. That pipeline has been priced out of existence. Customs duties on individual imported package lines, combined with An Post’s handling and clearance surcharge, mean that a nominal package costing pennies now incurs substantial fixed fees before it can be collected. With mandatory electronic data pre-clearing every parcel, anonymous mail drops are intercepted instantly at customs, turning small speculative orders into guaranteed financial liabilities and triggering immediate Garda scrutiny.
Tightened Cross-Border Enforcement: The primary pipeline of illicit fireworks—traditionally run down the M1 corridor from Northern Ireland by boot-dealers exploiting licensing disparities—has been systematically dismantled by coordinated Garda and PSNI checkpoints under Operation Tombola, alongside enhanced freight screening at postal sorting hubs.
Pre-emptive Council Sweeps: Dublin City Council's public domain teams have operated with ruthless efficiency, tracking and confiscating timber caches within hours of their appearance, rendering days of scavenging completely futile.
The Lockdown of Timber Chains: Commercial businesses and fruit markets across the north inner city now heavily secure and account for returnable deposit pallets, closing off the surplus scrap that previously fuelled local street pyres.
Structured Municipal Alternatives: The deliberate funding of organised, non-destructive public events and family-friendly light displays has quietly severed the generational momentum of street-corner fires.
Justifying the Purchase
Photographers spend decades obsessing over rectilinear purity, hunting down lenses with zero barrel distortion, flat field focus, and corner-to-corner sharpness that keeps every chimney breast and sash window strictly perpendicular to the pavement.
Throwing an ultra-wide fisheye onto the camera undoes all that sobriety in an instant. It forces you to stop behaving like an architectural surveyor and start seeing the city through pure caricature. It turns a flat municipal campaign against stockpiled bonfire pallets into an uncanny, nocturnal creature-feature.
Whether that constitutes a valid documentary use case or merely an elaborate, self-indulgent excuse for having an 8–14mm lens in the bag remains up for debate. But for Holy Eve in the north inner city, seeing the world through the distorted gaze of a pavement-level goblin felt entirely appropriate.
There is a fine line between high-concept artistic vision and the sudden, creeping realisation that you have spent good money on an optic essentially designed to bend reality until it snaps.
Buying an ultra-wide fisheye zoom is one of those impulsive gear decisions that sounds brilliant on paper. In your head, you imagine dynamic architectural sweeps, immersive environmental records, and bold, experimental street frames. Then you take it out onto the pavement, look through the viewfinder, and confront the unvarnished truth: unless you intend to shoot a 1990s skateboarding video or survey the inside of a drainage culvert, the lens makes the ordinary world look completely unhinged.
Straight kerbstones melt into crescent moons, vertical brick facades lean inwards like looming precipices, your own shoes constantly threaten to hijack the lower third of the composition, and anything further than six feet away recedes into an insignificant pinpoint on the horizon.
Yet, standing on Henrietta Place in the dying days of October, the madness of the glass finally found its spiritual home. If you ever wondered what the city looks like from the perspective of an ankle-high goblin or a bewildered Halloween monster sizing up Dublin 1, this is it.
The View from the Gutter: Municipal Dublin Through Bent Glass
At hip height, the lens strips Dublin's familiar street furniture of its rectilinear sobriety, turning civic notices into a carnival funhouse:
The Squeezed Sanctuary of Henrietta Place: Crouched beside the boundary railings of the residential flats, the council’s cheerful orange banner advertising the "Halloween Spooktacular" beside the Fruit and Veg Market looks less like a friendly neighbourhood invitation and more like a glowing portal into another realm. The vertical railings curve outwards like the ribs of an iron trap, while the bats, cartoon tombstones, and grinning pumpkins swell grotesquely towards the front element.
The Looming Decree on the Corner: Move a few paces along the curve towards the corner hoarding, and the council’s warning sign takes on the proportions of an apocalyptic warning. "Stay Safe This Halloween in the North West Inner City" billows outward like a sail in a gale. The cartoon blood drips and the startled black cat loom disproportionately large, while the solid Georgian brickwork of the terrace behind leans precariously backwards, as if retreating from the sheer visual punch of the municipal hotline.
A Step Function in the City: The Uncanny Quiet of 2026
For those of us living on Henrietta Place and Henrietta Street, the final week of October has historically meant locking the front door, battening down the hatches, and bracing for the inevitable fallout of rogue bonfires, screaming fireworks, and the very real prospect of structural property damage. It was a seasonal siege.
Yet this year has brought a genuine step function: an unexpected, round-the-clock calm. The familiar daylight precursors—the dragging of stolen shipping pallets through cobbled lanes, the rattles of shopping trolleys loaded with timber, and the concussive daylight explosions echoing off Georgian brickwork—have simply failed to materialise.
The sudden collapse of this street ritual stems from several converging factors:
The Squeeze on Mail-Order Imports: For years, informal sellers and curious youths sourced cheap parcels of pyrotechnics and novelty accessories directly from vendors outside the European Union. That pipeline has been priced out of existence. Customs duties on individual imported package lines, combined with An Post’s handling and clearance surcharge, mean that a nominal package costing pennies now incurs substantial fixed fees before it can be collected. With mandatory electronic data pre-clearing every parcel, anonymous mail drops are intercepted instantly at customs, turning small speculative orders into guaranteed financial liabilities and triggering immediate Garda scrutiny.
Tightened Cross-Border Enforcement: The primary pipeline of illicit fireworks—traditionally run down the M1 corridor from Northern Ireland by boot-dealers exploiting licensing disparities—has been systematically dismantled by coordinated Garda and PSNI checkpoints under Operation Tombola, alongside enhanced freight screening at postal sorting hubs.
Pre-emptive Council Sweeps: Dublin City Council's public domain teams have operated with ruthless efficiency, tracking and confiscating timber caches within hours of their appearance, rendering days of scavenging completely futile.
The Lockdown of Timber Chains: Commercial businesses and fruit markets across the north inner city now heavily secure and account for returnable deposit pallets, closing off the surplus scrap that previously fuelled local street pyres.
Structured Municipal Alternatives: The deliberate funding of organised, non-destructive public events and family-friendly light displays has quietly severed the generational momentum of street-corner fires.
Justifying the Purchase
Photographers spend decades obsessing over rectilinear purity, hunting down lenses with zero barrel distortion, flat field focus, and corner-to-corner sharpness that keeps every chimney breast and sash window strictly perpendicular to the pavement.
Throwing an ultra-wide fisheye onto the camera undoes all that sobriety in an instant. It forces you to stop behaving like an architectural surveyor and start seeing the city through pure caricature. It turns a flat municipal campaign against stockpiled bonfire pallets into an uncanny, nocturnal creature-feature.
Whether that constitutes a valid documentary use case or merely an elaborate, self-indulgent excuse for having an 8–14mm lens in the bag remains up for debate. But for Holy Eve in the north inner city, seeing the world through the distorted gaze of a pavement-level goblin felt entirely appropriate.
MY NEW FISHEYE LENS