Last Instinct

Did you know that you could get lenses for your mobile phone? A couple of months ago, I found an article at Gizmodo about these lenses. I did some googling and found a retailer in Hong Kong, selling all kinds of strange phone gadgets and more importantly, the kind of lenses I was looking for.

At the moment they are selling three kind of lenses; a 2x tele lens, a 180° fisheye lens and a combined wide/0.67x macro lens.

It was a bit unclear which lens to buy and what size, since the video guides I found were a bit confusing. It didn’t get easier with the fact that the website of the dealer was a bit messy when it came to finding products. But after some comparing I decided that it didn’t matter which one I chose, since they all were unbelievably cheap. About $10-$16 including shipping.

I was worried about the delivery and how trustworthy the company was so I just ordered one lens the first round. I decided to go for a combined wide/macro lens. After about a week I got a mail saying that the package had been sent and about two weeks after that, the package arrived to me in Sweden. The customs declaration on the package actually declared the value of the lens to no more than about $3.

After the first successful delivery, I also ordered a 2x tele lens and a 0.67x fish eye lens. The tele lens was also delivered recently after about 3 weeks but I’m still waiting for the fisheye lens. I will put up some sample images when it arrives. To my joy, the note saying the other order was delayed, was really a piece of beautiful design!

The lenses are mounted onto your phone with a pretty strong magnet. Most phones isn’t ferromagnetic metal, so the package comes with three attachable metal rings to put around the camera on your phone. They are 13 mm outer width and 9.5 mm inner width. You have to make sure that the surface around your camera is flat and that the ring doesn’t cover the flash.

The metal ring fitted perfectly on my Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro and it doesn’t seem to fit on iPhone 4, since it covers the flash. However, when attaching the lenses, they’re in the way of the flash on my x10. Hopefully, they will develop phones with prepared lens mounts in the future.

The lenses comes with lens covers and a strap for keeping hold of your lens. At first, I put the strap on the phone, but I discovered that it wasn’t a great idea since the magnet of the lens affected the compass on the phone, which made the navigation act weird. But then moving the lens away from the phone, everything went back to normal.

The back cover is actually also magnetic and attaches strongly to the lens.

13mm wide/0.67x macro lens

The first lens I tried was the wide/0.67x macro lens. This is an amazing lens which is a wide lens in normal mode and acts as macro lens when mounted apart. The wide mode makes great pictures, but the macro is really stunning.

13mm 2x telephoto lens

The 2x tele lens I got a week ago is not as great as the wide lens. It gets a heavy vignette when used with my phone. I guess its because it has a rather wide angle camera. This makes the lens a bit useless but adds a somewhat cool effect. It would probably be a bit better if the lens was a bit bigger.

13/15mm 180° fisheye lens

The fisheye lens seems the coolest, but I haven’t tried it out yet, since I’m waiting for the package to arrive. This lens comes in to sizes; a 13mm and a 15mm. From what I read, they both comes with the same size metal rings. The 15mm is said to give sharper images with less distortion, so that convinced me to order the bigger one.  Let’s just hope it fits!

I got an attachable wide/macro lens for mobile phone a while ago. I mounted it onto my X10 mini pro and the images with the lens on is really impressive. Also check out the pictures from the tele lens.

The images are untouched.

As well as the wide/macro lens, I go an attachable tele lens for mobile phone a while ago. This lens was not as impressive as the other lens. This one has some heavy vignetting, which made me a bit disappointed.

The images are untouched.

I’m glad to announce that I’ve been nominated this year as well. Last year I won the gold medal for the LdB campaign I made at Basilicon. This year’s contribution is the Christmas card making site we made to promote Basilicon annually. It’s a kind of crazy application where you can put together your own Santa Claus from the different face parts of me and my co-workers and send as a Christmas card to your friends.

The project is an offspring from the LdB campaign, and my part this time was photography, the overall UI graphics and the server side scripting.

Please cast your vote for us (this week only) at Svenska Designpriset. Remember to submit your e-mailaddress when you vote.

I got a bit inspired by my previous Sparkling sunset made with Photoshop and wanted to make a proof of concept for Adobe Flash. So I animated the sunset. This is what you can do with Flash without using much code. I have just used a few lines to randomize starting points. All other graphic effects are built into Flash and needs no coding.

Wouldn’t it be cool if sunsets like these existed?

I found some amazing colorful wallpapers in a theme pack for Windows 7 called Surreal Territory by Chuck Anderson of NoPattern. He has really done a lot of great colorful designs! I got a bit inspired to make something similar. So I took one of my photos from Skanör last weekend and made a truly colorful sparkling sunset! Feel free to download it as a wallpaper or something. =)

Try the live demo of the Channel Colorizer Pixel Bender filter I made a couple of weeks ago. You can load an image or use your webcam and then change the RGB colors to some cool theme using coloring by Adobe Kuler. And naturally, you can save your images back to your disk to use them for anything you like.

Adobe Kuler gives the coloring an extra dimension. You can search for whatever comes to your mind: bananas, fire, happiness, an author or a specific color. Just keep in mind that you have to be a little bit patient with the search times, since the kuler-servers seems to be a bit overloaded.

The demo features a couple of really cool techniques:

• The Pixel Bender filter running live with webcam support.
• Coloring themes using Adobe Kuler via the ColorMunch AS3 class by Ben Kanizay
• Asynchronous saving of JPEG-files in Flash based on libjpeg using the Alchemy JPEG-encoder AS3 class by Mateusz Małczak

Go ahead and make some cool images and feel free to post some comments about it!

ChannelColorizer by Klas Lundberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Sweden.
Feel free to contact me if you want it for commercial use.

I went for a walk in the nice weather at Västra Hamnen in Malmö today. The air temperature was about 2°C and a bit sunny. Then I suddenly saw a couple of guys getting ready to bath in the cold water (apparently about 0°C). Unbelievable! So I took a couple of pictures and one of them got into the local newspaper. =) You can read about it at Sydsvenskan (in swedish).

The golden section is perceived and used by most humans, whether they know it or not. By thinking about it and use it in you photos or other graphics, you can get a great composition easily.

The golden ratio works like this mathematically:

If you have a small section and a large section, the relation between the two is the same as the relation between the large section and total section (the sum of the two sections together). After doing some math we find that if the smaller section is 1, the bigger section is ~1.62. This means that the golden section is positioned at ~62% of the two together.

You should not get obsessed with this number when it comes to design and you should not use it with too much exactness. It’s really just a good hint about what humans generally like in composition. Since we naturally like it — it’s easy to use. You don’t have to measure or use a template for it, you just have to know about it. Since we like it, we easily guess where the position of the golden section is.

To use it in a composition, just take out the main element in the image and position it in the golden section. The hard part could be to identify what element in the photo that is the main element or the most significant line. You have to identify what the eye looks at first or what you want it to look at. Try to identify lines in the image or objects that differ from the rest. Here are a few examples:

• If you have a whole person in an big environment, you naturally look at the person.
• If you just have a person, the main element is the eyes of the person.
• If you have a landscape, the horizon is often the most significant line.

The example to the left is unmodified and the photo to the right was cropped.