So I Tried One Of Those Cheap Lens Kits For Your Phone...

Ever since I realized my iPhone 6 can rival my Canon 7D in picture quality, I've been leaving the Canon home more and more. And since I lurrrve fish-eye photos, I decided to try one of those snap-on lens kits for your phone:

This is the set I bought about 6 months ago, though my clips look different - I guess they've already updated them? Anyway, it's less than $15 over on Amazon. Like I said: CHEAP. It has 3 lenses: fisheye, wide-angle, and a macro, but for me the fisheye is the fun one.

Embarrassingly enough, I actually have a nice fisheye lens for my real camera, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. The settings are hard, all my compositions feel wrong, and overall I just felt like an idiot with it, so I gave up.

But a phone is easy. No settings to worry about, easy to experiment with, and for less than $15, why not, right?

So I've been putting this dinky little fisheye through its paces out at Disney and Universal over the past few months, and having a blast. Here's a sampling of some of my favorite shots, all taken with the lens on my iPhone:

It doesn't have the extreme fisheye distortion you can get with a "real" lens, but this is still enough to give the same feel. For best results, get your phone right on top of something in the foreground, to really warp and stretch the composition.

If you stand back, you'll get something more like this:

Which is really more of a wide-angle, very little distortion.

That can be awesome sometimes, though, like with the dragon:

Thanks to the fisheye I can get the buildings leaning into frame, which looks awesome!

You can also get so much more of these incredible ceilings in the shot:

The drawbacks to a cheap snap-on lens are probably obvious: it sticks out, so it's cumbersome, you have to take it off and on every time you want to use it, which takes times, and you have to carry the lenses separately. Also, mine is so cheap it literally fell to pieces yesterday when I went to snap it on. ACK. John managed to put it all back together, but now it's chipped from hitting the ground. (Have I mentioned these aren't great quality? :D)

Now let's talk photo-editing, since that's what takes your photos from "meh" to "'MAZING."  I love the free app SnapSeed, which is incredibly user-friendly and rather addicting. I'm forever editing photos on my phone, just for fun.

Here's an example of SnapSeed's HDR function:

And here's one I started editing on my phone, then finished in Adobe Lightroom:

 For comparison, here's how the train looked straight off my phone, no edits:

Gah, I love befores-and-afters, don't you?

Here's another from Disney, starting with the "before"

For this shot I was shooting straight into the sun, so it took ALL the editing to save it:

It's still a mess, but it's a prettier mess.

My favorite shot from that day:

Again, shooting right into the sun, so this is another mess of sun spot action. Kinda artsy, though, right?

Here's one without all the sun spots, to give you a better idea of the picture quality:

With a cheap lens you're not going to get fantastic quality - so these wouldn't be good for, say, printing out at large sizes. But for FB or Instagram snaps? Not bad!

Fish-eye is awesome for Big Things That Are Too Close, so keep that in mind when shooting. Again, if you shoot too far back:

... it really doesn't do much for you, artistically speaking.

Though it still helps fit a LOT in there:

Ideally you'll get something right on top of your lens in the foreground, since that's where the magic happens:

I'll end with another favorite, which of course is the Diagon Alley dragon again:

I had no idea the fireworks were about to start as I lined up this shot, so it was the happiest of accidents when they went off in the perfect spot!

And here's a Prisma variation of that same shot:

Prisma is another of my favorite free apps - sooo much fun to play with!

I hope I've inspired some of you to take more photos! Phone photography is one of the best and easiest ways to flex your creative muscles, not to mention a perfect distraction for anxiety-sufferers when we're out in public. Taking pictures with my phone lets me interact with my environment while still feeling somewhat shielded from it. It gives me something to focus on (heyoo!) anytime I'm feeling overwhelmed or uncomfortable, like long car trips, so the fact that I also get to take away something pretty at the same time is pure cherries.

Have any of you played with snap-on phone lenses? If so, any recommendations? I'd love to get a better quality set now that I know I'll actually use them!