If you want to do more with your phone’s camera, this list of great accessories will help you discover ways to take photos you may not have known about. Let’s find out how you can see more with your smartphone camera than your eyes can.
Monoculars are your best friend for long-distance photos
Small monoculars can be found cheap on Amazon and they’re often bundled with a phone holder. I bought one a few months ago to take with my binoculars when I go bird watching. I don’t want to have to hold my phone near the binoculars and have the bird suddenly disappear.
This inexpensive monocular offers 8x magnification, allowing you to take photos of distant objects without resorting to digital zoom and reducing image quality. The Samsung S24 Ultra may have 5x optical zoom, but it costs a lot and you may not need the S24 Ultra. Monocular attachments allow you to get even more magnification without buying a whole phone dedicated to telephoto images.
I recommend using these in daylight because the objective lenses are usually small and don’t let in a lot of light. I took this photo of an Olive-backed Sunbird from far enough away so as not to scare it away, and it’s my favorite way to enjoy birds without disturbing them.
Get a closer look with a macro lens for your phone
We talked about getting closer to distant objects with a monocular lens, but a tiny world that you can touch is hard to see with the naked eye without a macro lens.
Macro lenses allow you to get a lens much closer to an object than monocular lenses that have a farther minimum focal distance. Having a macro lens on your phone is a great way to get started in macro photography. I didn’t even actually use a macro lens for a phone. I took apart a flashlight with a focusing lens and used the focusing lens as a macro lens.
Using a dedicated macro lens will be much easier than a loose lens piece that you have to put on by hand. These macro lenses usually cost around $5-10, but there are also high quality lenses that are longer with more magnification. The image above is my favorite watch macro image taken with the simple lens in the first image.
Affordable Underwater Photography with a Waterproof Case
Underwater photography equipment is quite expensive, waterproof housings for full-size cameras alone cost as much as a camera. However, you can still take great underwater photos with a waterproof case.
On our trip to Bohol Island, we went whale shark watching and the waterproof cases we bought were only made of plastic. Like a plastic ziplock bag with a strap that goes around your neck so you don’t lose it. You could probably also make your own at home with a ziplock bag, but I wouldn’t let a quick DIY solution be responsible for my phone in the middle of the ocean.
