STEP BY STEP

On your bike

1 Find unusual angles

Find an unusual angle to make the most of the fisheye effect. For our shot, James lay down on the ground and composed it so that the path and rails are at the edges of the frame, where the curvature is most extreme.

2 Get in close

It’s best to use a fisheye lens really close to your subject. The minimum focusing distance on our Nikon 10.5mm is just 3cm, so we had to wait until the bike wheel passed a few inches from the lens before firing the shutter.

3 Light with flash

A flash set to Manual at ¼ power and fired by a wireless trigger lights the subject from the side. You can see the burst in the top-left corner of the image – a happy accident that shows the extreme angle of view.

4 Exposure info

When using off-camera flash, it’s usually best to put your Nikon in Manual mode. We set 1/250 sec, ISO400. As the apparent depth of field with fisheyes is huge, even an aperture of f/5.6 gives near front-to-back sharpness.