Time to Upgrade Your Smartphone Camera

With every new year, smartphone cameras show signs of improvement and better, rapidly drawing closer the nature of higher-end cameras. Smartphones have pretty much annihilated the point & shoot market. Adding to this are the innovators and business people who are making great embellishments and applications to take cell phone photography significantly facilitate. Here are a few suggestions for incredible smartphone camera accomplices to take your photography to the following level.

This iPhone shoots at what might as well be called around 32mm and a determination of more than 3200 pixels over!

This is a 100 percent harvest of the same photograph.

LENSES

iPhones and most smartphones have a fixed lens. Some of them are pretty good for their size, offering apertures as low as f/2.0. However, since most of them are fixed around 30-35mm (as compared to a full-frame camera) you are locked into a particular perspective. Even, if you “zoom,” the perspective doesn’t change, it only gets magnified. And the quality degrades as you zoom in. To overcome this problem, creative people have invented ways of changing your focal length through accessory lenses. Some of them give you a wider perspective, some of them give you a zoomed in perspective, and some change the look of the image through filters.

Moment lenses sells two lenses. One will double your focal length and one will half it and both are super high quality pieces. Olloclip sells a 4-in-1 device that gives you four different lenses: wide angle, fish eye and two macro zooms at 10x and 15x. Olloclip also sells a polarizing lens and a telephoto. There are plenty of other options for changing your focal length as well as specialty lenses, like the Lensbaby Sweetspot, which gives you an interesting blurring effect.

Macro attachment captures stitching on a baseball cap

Macro attachment looking at sand on a beach.

POINT-AND-SHOOT CONVERTER

For the very serious iPhone photographer, there is Snappgrip. This device gives you an extra grip on your phone, plus the dials and buttons that allow you to skip the on-screen menus. Snappgrip also lets you prefocus and take the shot with one button, like you would on a regular camera. If you spend a lot of time shooting iPhone photos and just want a little more control, this could be the thing for you.

STABILITY

Sometimes you need a tripod for the ultimate selfie, to take a photo in a difficult spot, or just for a little extra stability in your videos. There are a ton of different tripod options for smartphones. The most basic option is to get a mount for your existing tripod. or you can invest in an all-in-one tripod and head combo that holds the phone. Or you can get something like the Joby Griptight, which will hold on just about anywhere.

If you shoot a lot of video with your smartphone, besides a tripod, you may also want to look into a stabilizer like the Steadicam Smoothie. This is just a much smaller version of the Steadicams used for major motion pictures. It gives you the effect of the camera flying through the air and is great for introducing some movement into your iPhone filmmaking.

WATERPROOF CASE

Getting the perfect photo sometimes means that you have to brave less than perfect conditions. For anywhere that you need protection from the elements, a waterproof case can come in handy and give you the piece of mind that your phone is safe. Cases like the one Lifeproof makes keeps your smartphone safe while maintaining the functionality of your phone’s camera. The Lifeproof case can even be used as an underwater camera up to a depth of 2 meters.

BACKUP BATTERY

If you use your phone a lot and plan on taking a lot of photos or videos throughout a day, it might be a good idea to have some extra juice on hand. When you are away from a place to charge your phone up or unable to stop long enough to wait for a charge, there are backup battery chargers to give you a boost. Dozens of companies make these at a reasonable price but one of the coolest is the Trianium Atomic S case for iPhone. This is a case and battery charger in one, effectively doubling your battery life.

PRINTER

You may not need to make prints in the field, but if you really want to blow someone’s mind, pick up something like the Fuji Instax Printer. You can instantly print Polaroid quality photos straight from your smartphone. New accessories are being created every week and I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.