iPhone Photography Day 6 | My Fisheye Lens and 5 Tips for Amazing Photos

For Christmas, my husband and daughter gave me a lens kit for my iPhone 5s. Oh they know me so well.

In the kit has four lenses, wide angle, macro, telephoto, and fisheye, to use with a lens-specific case and tripod. I’m going to talk about all the lenses as I use them, but I might’ve been the most excited about the fisheye.

If you’re not familiar, a fisheye lens is one that takes a photo in a circle, so that straight lines in the photo become skewed and bent. It will take a photo of 180 degrees of an entire landscape. It can exaggerate a curved horizon line or inside walls, like in my kitchen above.

I’ve been photographing things that I’m might typically shoot, just with my fisheye instead.

Things like the kid’s rooms: (And yes, that is an intentional blur over my sleeping daughter.)

A regular camera would never show that much of her room. If you could see the floor, you wouldn’t see the ceiling. If you could see one wall, you wouldn’t see the other. The range is lovely.

But here are other subjects that look great shot with a fisheye. Like Max, after he gave himself a black eye with a metal, matchbook-sized hot rod. It was purple, the car and his eye.

There are a million more things I want to shoot with my iPhone and Fisheye-the beach, Charleston Harbor, the bridges or piers, Julia’s dance recital, the grocery store.

But here are some tricks I’m learning as I go.

• The details go on the edges: This is why the pictures of my kids’ rooms are so much better than the pics of Max up close. He’s in the middle, and that’s not the interesting part of the photograph.
• Perspective is key: tilting up and down, left and right might make or break the photo. And getting low or high makes all the difference in the world.
• Clean and simple is better: This is a hard tip to remember when you’re photographing inside, but when I hit the pier or the beach wide expanses of horizon will really show off what the fisheye can do.
• Low light is okay: typically, shooting in low light on an iPhone makes for gross grainy photos. Its kind of my pet peeve, but the curve of a fisheye means that more light gets in and so low light photos are simpler and higher quality.
• Your Horizon line belongs in the center: With a traditional lens, putting the horizon in the middle of the frame makes your photo expected and boring. But it’s oaky with a fisheye because there’s so much interesting going on in the rest of the photo.