Miniature camera phone lenses and photo editing phone apps has solved one of my biggest travel nightmares; how to take amazing photos without lugging around a five kilo, £2,000 bag full of lenses and a DSLR camera. This simple guide to getting the most out of your smart phone will save you aching shoulders and stress, because lets face it, nothing screams tourist mug me like an expensive bag of camera equipment.
Camera Phone Lenses
Add simple camera phone lenses to your smart phone and your smart phone camera goes from one dimensional point and click to complete versatility. I’d advise getting the Olloclip 3 in 1 photo lens (fish eye, macro and wide angle lens for around $100). While it sounds expensive and there are definitely crappy cheaper Chinese imitations out there, like so much in life you get what you pay for.
The quality of the macro lens is absolutely first class and can’t be faulted, while the wide angle doubles the field of view of your normal phone. Aesthetically though these camera phone lenses would have Steve Jobs turning in his grave as it is just plain ugly (luckily photo editing phone apps have no such drawback).
Photo Editing Phone Apps
There are a ton of photo editing phone apps out there and I’m not about to tell you which one is the best as they each have good points and bad. I would personally recommend using a combination of different photo editing phone apps in conjunction with camera phone lenses for the best results. For example I recently started using a combination of Photoshop Express and Camera + (both of these are paid apps).
Using Camera + to take the photos allows you to instantly focus the shot on certain points in the frame. This improves exposure and obviously the focus. After using the Camera + photo editing phone app on your photo, you can finish editing it with Photoshop Express. This allows you to edit the noise, contrast and saturation on the photo.
Result
Combining the Photoshop Express and Camera + photo editing phone apps with different camera phone lenses will give you simply incredible photos. The best thing is that these apps and equipment comes at a fraction of the weight cost of a DSLR and computer.
Photography