Shaving Tokina 10-17 For aps-h

Today I received my new $600 fisheye in the mail & now it's time to take a hacksaw to it.
Finding a fisheye lens for a Canon 1D, aps-h 1.3x crop, seems almost impossible. You can either buy an 8mm 1.6 fisheye or a 15mm fisheye for fullframe. With the crop sensor fisheye you'll get vignetting & see the lens hood as a border & on the 15mm full frame fisheye your 1.3x crop will zoom it into 19.5mm & you'll no longer get 180 degrees field of view. Solution: Get an 11mm fisheye. However, nobody makes one. The only possible way to get 180 degrees field of view on an aps-h is to get the one adjustable fisheye made for 1.6 crop & then shave off the lens hood, then when you zoom in to 11mm you'll theoretically get 180 degrees field of view or more with only slight vignetting.

If you're reading this cause you need a fisheye for your 1D you may soon find yourself with a Tokina 10-17 & a hacksaw. There's several tutorials around about how to do this. A common way to "protect" the glass is to roll up a piece of paper & reinforce it with tape then put this around the lens. It sounded great but it wont help at all. You're cutting too close to the edge of the paper & when the hacksaw breaks through the lens hood it'll just push the paper & scratch up your lens. I now know this from experience. Fortunately, I can't really notice the scratches in my images. My one other piece of advice if you do this is that you don't have to cut all the way through. If you're cutting slowly then you'll notice a black line appear in the middle of your silver cut. This is the paint on the other side of the metal. If you can cut to this point all around the lens then you should be able to break off the lens hood with needle nose pliers.

Now that I have cut off my lens hood, I strongly suggest that you dont. Reason being, if you just want a neat fisheye then you don't need 180 degrees to get a fishy look. If you're doing this cause you're doing virtual tours & you need the 180 degrees then you should just buy an 8mm fisheye for 1.6crop & then when you upload the images into ptgui you can click "advance" & quickly crop out the vignetting. I wish I would have know this a week ago.  If you have any 1.3 fisheye questions just leave a comment & I'll be happy to send a response.