A Visit To Kidwelly Castle

Kidwelly began in the early 12th century as a Norman ‘ringwork’ castle made of wood and protected only by an earthen bank and ditch. Not surprisingly it was under constant attack by Welsh princes including the Lord Rhys, who captured it in 1159. Today, along with the group, I visited this historic castle, along with the local church, plus a little walk along the river. It gave me an opportunity to use my fisheye lens alongside my 18-135mm.

Kidwelly Castle is beautiful, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try out my new lens, as well as enjoy the second hottest day of the year. We walked and photographed in the 26+ degrees heat, with high humidity, and managed to get some great photographs. More importantly, we had a great day!

All images are taken on my Fujifilm X-T3 with the already mentioned lenses, and they were colour graded in Photoscape X Pro. I was after a dated look. Sadly, I forgot to use my film camera today! But there is always another day. Images are single shot 18-135mm unless stated otherwise.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I just LOVE fisheye lenses! As can be seen in the image, for general use they can be fun and exciting, and in landscape shots, you don’t even notice that it is a fisheye lens. Of course, there are people who dislike fisheye the look of images from a fisheye lens, but that’s ok, because you can take out the effect…

• 

• 

• 

• 

These have had no other lens correction other than taking away the fisheye (actually version 1.5 of my technique which was further refined by the time I got to the end of this article). Of course, you could straighten, adjust vertical’s etc if you wanted to, but I’ve just shown the simplest fixes. Hopefully I can get into a town or city centre soon to do a different kind of photography with the lens. You CAN see how the lens looks on modern buildings on my previous blog where I compared it taking photos of my house. That was actually de-fished in a different way as shown here…

(Sorry that I’ve gone technical for this section)

• 

• 

• 

• 

De-Fish version 1 was a technique I had used since the circular fisheye. Basically using the Fisheye function in Photoscape X Pro in negative. The technique works really well, but I thought I could do much better.

De-Fish version 2 is a combination of lens distortion correction and the above technique. It has allowed a much wider starting point as can be seen, in fact, quite significant. The image from here can be easily worked on, perhaps fine tweaks and even a little stretch of the image.

Anyway… I hope you enjoyed! Please call back soon!