Until now if you wanted to go really wide with a Fujifilm GFX camera, your widest option would have been the Laowa 15mm f/4.5R Zero-D Shift Lens, while Fujifilm’s widest GF offering would be the GF20-35mmF4 R WR. But now AstrHori has absolutely smashed the wide-angle record for GF-mount lenses with its new MF 8mm F2.4 Circular Fisheye Lens. For context, an 8mm medium format focal length equates to just 6.3mm in full-frame terms, and it results in a colossal 220-degree field of view. That’s so wide that this lens can actually see behind itself, and it also means you’ve even got to be careful when hand-holding the camera, as your own fingers may start encroaching into the image frame!
Obviously being a circular rather than rectilinear fisheye lens, this field of view means each shot will contain a circular image projection within a black frame, and distortion will be integral to the circular rendering, but that’s all part of the fun.
Despite the immense field of view, the lens itself is surprisingly compact for a medium format optic, measuring just 62mm long and weighing in at 517g. Focussing is manual only, but that’s really no issue with a lens with such a short focal length, as depth of field will be huge, even at the maximum f/2.4 aperture. This is also fast enough to make the lens suitable for astrophotography, should you want to capture more of the night sky than ever before in a single frame.
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Inside the metal barrel is a 10-element optical stack arranged in 8 groups, containing two extra-low dispersion elements and two high refractive index elements to help reduce chromatic aberrations – vital on a lens with such a wide field of view. The aperture diaphragm is comprised of 10 blades, which has the potential for creating smoother bokeh, but you’ll have to fully exploit the 0.1m minimum focus distance to create anything close to a shallow depth of field with a lens this wide.
The AstrHori 8mm f/2.4 Circular Fisheye Lens is available to pre-order now, in either Fujifilm GF or Hasselblad X mounts, each priced at $398, which is makes this one of the least expensive new medium format lenses available.
