For years now, any smartphone user has been snap happy with the use of the camera feature on their phone. Any special or funny moment, any selfie or any picturesque meal can be snapped and put on Instagram with a hashtag of your choice.
With millions of people taking photos on their iPhone everyday, Olloclip made a product that aims to bring every single photo to life.
Subtle yet stylish, each lens fits over the camera on your phone, and allows you to take pictures of a professional quality. The weight and size of each lens is perfect, making it easy to carry around and capture any scenic moment given the opportunity.
These easy to use products make it possible for any iPhone user to become an amateur photographer. Once you see the quality of your photos, using and experimenting with the different lenses becomes addictive.
The 4-in-1 lens is the most practical of Olloclips collection. Aimed towards the more inexperienced photographers, the 4 lenses to choose from are the fisheye, wide angle, 15X macro and the 10X macro lens. Most of the lenses offer something different, as the fisheye lens rounds your photos and gives them a more creative effect, whereas the macro lens’ focus on the most minute details to give clear, crisp details in the smallest objects. The wide angle lens didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Used both portrait and landscape, comparing photos with the wide angle lens to ones taken without lens showed no real difference. Disappointing, but the other 3 lenses more than compensate.
Having saved the best till last, the Telephoto and Polarising lenses were a real treat. Whilst using them around my favourite dog walking spot, Sywell Reservoir, the quality of these lenses really showed. The telephoto was ideal for capturing images in forested areas, and the polarising reduced the amount of glare and reflection from the reservoir itself. These particular lenses were the most enjoyable to use, as they showed most difference between original photos.
Annoyingly, the lenses are extremely fidgety. You spend more time trying to position the lens over the camera correctly and swapping the lenses than you do actually taking pictures. On the packaging, it claims that the lenses slip on and off in seconds, which isn’t the case. You have to be quite forceful when putting them on, as they don’t just slide on. I understand that they need to be a snug fit so that they stay in position when taking photos, but as they are mad out of aircraft grade aluminium, I was left with a number of small scratches on the surface of my phone.
The Olloclip lenses are a great bit of kit if you are a keen photographer or if you have a specific need for different lenses. But with the cheapest lens for an iPhone 5 cost £40, there isn’t that much of a difference in the quality of photos to warrant purchasing an Olloclip lens if you just take the occasional photo.
Charlie Atkinson
