I love taking photos. Not that I make any earnings from them (save for the $2 I earned once), but I don't usually plan on taking photos for income. I just love to keep good memorabilia of events and places.
However, this is not the real reason I got one. See, I do yoga, but doing yoga at home means finding a good spot where you can take photos and film your practice for adjustments and well, for joining challenges too. I used to do my practice at the sala, but sometimes the time I have for practice may not be a good time for others are using the sala too.
I had to move to my small guest room which I use mostly for laundry and stacking curtains, bedsheets and bags. However, since the room is pretty small, getting a good angle for a whole body frame is a challenge! Sometimes my photos and videos don't show everything and it's frustrating to keep re-taking the shot at different angles.
I went for a hunt for good but cheap wide lenses. Of course, I found my ideal lens was Moment Lens, but it's not locally available and yes, quite expensive for just one lens. The Moment wide lens wouldn't show any vignetting because the lens is actually shaped to be fitted on a specific phone case. Although the quality looks good, I found that a little bit frustrating. I love my current phone case, and honestly, I don't really need a lot of different cases. I hate duplication.
So, here I found Black Eye lens from a local Apple reseller store. I quickly went to check. Black Eye has other lenses like Cinema Wide (which is the one I really wanted, but this is not available locally), Fish Eye and a Telephoto lens. I opted for the wide since I don't like the distortion of Fish Eye lens, and I didn't feel like I needed the Tele lens.
I took my lens out for a spin yesterday while I was at the Mall of Asia. You will see that some photos have vignetting effect--that's because of the placement of the clip on the lens. I noticed that placing the lens on the front camera yields less vignetting. I think it's the bezel of the back camera that's getting in the way of a good angle of the clip that's producing the vignette effect.
Anyhow, the photo will look great if you stay away from vertical lines and/or horizontal lines. If they are closer to you, the more they will appear like a fish-eye lens shot, since both the wide lens and fish eye lens have over 100 degrees of coverage.
Here are the photos I took:
Landscape, rear camera, with vignetting
Landscape, rear camera, no vignetting
Landscape, rear camera, no vignetting, has curvy lines (lower right)
Landscape, rear camera, like fisheye, has curvy lines
Landscape, rear camera, has curvy lines
Portrait, front camera, curvy lines not very obvious
To sum up, I think this is a good lens for those beginning photography or just iphone photography. You'll need to practice clipping on the lens to find the right angle without vignetting if this bothers you. For me, I'll stick with this for now. I'm still happy with it.
