There's a commonly held belief that fisheye lenses are only good for two things: making sickeningly cute puppies even more bucket-filling, and making the most gorgeous people look awful. The reality is that the fisheye lens is actually a powerful tool that can be used to set your landscape shots apart from the crowd.
In many ways, you have to think of it like a high-end, rear wheel drive sports car. You cover a lot of ground in a short space of time; but try giving it too much, and it will probably get you killed (Point of fact – never, ever point it in jest at the tail-end of someone you can't outrun. It always ends badly).
There are certain things that you have to remember when using fisheye lenses.
You can't use graduated filters with them. They would have to be bowl-shaped to fit into the frame. This would be very expensive, and completely impractical. That's why nobody makes them.
Only the horizontal and vertical bisectors appear to be straight, because of the extreme barrel distortion. Moving away from the centre of the lens causes lines to bend. You can get software to correct this (DXO is fantastic), but if plan to do this a lot, save yourself some effort and get a linear wide-angle lens.
Small movements are greatly exaggerated when looking through a fisheye lens.
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT: Everything looks much further away than it really is. Think T-Rex chasing the jeep in Jurassic Park. It's like that, but the jeep would already have been swallowed whole. There are a few urban myths out there about people walking into moving air plane propellers whilst trying to use fisheye lenses. I don't know about this, but it's worth remembering if you're planning to use small rocks as foreground interest.
Obviously, there's a few things that must be considered to use these features to your advantage. The incompatibility of filters means that for landscape work, you're probably going to be working in the realms of HDRI (tricky due to exaggeration of movement, but practicable with a sturdy tripod), or at the very least, using flash to light your foregrounds. Linear (especially man-made) features can look really wrong. Fishyeyes really excel with natural features or circles. In this situation, they can give a very pleasing curve, and help boost your composition.
They aren't easy to use well, but the best stuff never is.
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