Commodity lenses for mobile phones

I have a rather nice, if old, Samsung camera. It weighs a kilo and has a long adjustable lense that cannot be changed. It takes quite ok photos, though the macro is hardly macro at all. I don't like to carry the camera along on trips and hikes etc. so lately I've either borrowed my teen's small but excellent Nicon or made do with the iPhone camera.

Some time ago I learned about these extra lenses you can get for your cellphone camera. I even tried a few, that my co-worker had bought and brought to the office to show them to us. A few weeks ago I finally decided, on a whim as usual, to order some lenses from Amazon. I got a 12X Optical Phone Camera Lens with Tripod and a CamKix Universal 3 in 1 Camera Lens Kit. Yes, I got them separately, because at first I only was going to buy the zoom lense, and only later decided on the lense kit.

The main things I have come to understand about the lenses are

• the macro lense rocks
• the 12x zoom lense is no good without the tripod or with a target that moves even a hair
• daylight is a must
• they will never replace the mentioned Samsung/Nicon cameras, because setting them on the phone camera is not exactly easy to do on the fly

This said, I'm not sorry I bought them, especially the macro lense and the 12x zoom, which I believe will prove to be excellent for certain types of photoshoots. The picture quality is rather good for a phone camera + small lense combo. Yet, on a hike or trip, I fear I will still be carrying a separate camera.

In the case of cameras and lenses, I guess pictures tell the story better than a thousand words.

12x zoom lense. Littlest Pet Shop photoshoot. Photoshopped ever so slightly: simply adjusted the levels and curves a bit (winter photography...).

12x zoom lense. Littlest Pet Shop photoshoot. Photoshopped ever so slightly: simply adjusted the levels and curves a bit. Taken without the tripod, actually.

12x zoom lense. Taken with tripod, slightly moving objects.

Macro lense. Thyme leaf (width approx. 5mm). Daylight, but taken inside the house.

Wide angle lense (top) vs. phone cam without any extra lense (bottom). Poor daylight inside the house, levels and curves adjusted slightly in Photoshop.

Fish eye lense. Don't really know what to do with that one...

Mirror mirror in the phone...

I was driving this morning in the rush hour traffic with my youngest daughter, when she dug her mascara out of her pocket and exclaimed: "I almost forgot! I had time for only one eye at home, need to swipe some mascara on the other one too." Then she opened the mirror on the window shade, but immediately dismissed it as inconvenient and started to fiddle with her phone.

"Do you have a mirror app there?" I asked her, halfway joking. "Duh! Camera!" was the answer, like only teens can, immediately making me feel stupid and old. "Um, righ, yeah. How stupid of me."

Just out of boredom, sitting there in the non-moving traffic, I took out my Lumia, opened the app store and typed in "mirror". To my astonishment there actually was a loooong list of mirror apps! I mean, I had already laughed at myself for forgetting that the front camera was a (im)perfect mirror indeed, but apparently a whole lot of app makers had had the same vanity thought of having a mirror app in the phone.

Just out of curiosity I installed the first one on the list, a free mirror app, and tried it. So I saw my face on the screen, the app using the front camera I assume (what would the option be anyway? a reflecting blank screen?). So now I have a mirror app in my Lumia. Never has my reflection been as grainy as it is in this mirror ;) The Lumia820 front camera is pretty sucky.

Agravating Photo Sync

After getting the camera kit for my iPad, I have happily been mostly juggling my photos via the iPad. So convenient to be using a little bit of PhotoShop Express to enhance some pics and creating some nice collages with e.g. PicCollage or InstaCollage and then using them in blogs, uploading to Flickr etc. iPad has all the right apps for all that activity (minus the adding videos to blog posts in Blogsy...).

My active photographing - whether it be with my proper Samsung or my Lumia, which I have been using increasingly lately since it's so readily available in all situations - and fiddling with the photos in different apps for different purposes, results in approx. 10000 photos a year (and this was the case even before the iPad...). Which means that my iPad quite frequently is running out of space and I need to delete some photos - ok, a lot!

But never before copying them to my hard drive, of course. Usually, I have done this via iCloud and my photostream. But the iCloud has a mind of its own, and I cannot control what is in the photostream and what is not and what and when is available on my laptop. And this agravates me big time. At least when it is not doing what I expect it to do.

I have accepted, that it has its own operation queues and my photos are not necessarily available on my laptop immediately (or even almost) after taking them (unlike e.g. the autoupload to OneDrive from my Lumia). Mostly, I can live with that, for be as it may, mostly, the photos have been available at some point. At least on my work laptop. For whatever mysterious reason, the photostream mostly refuses to sync itself on my personal laptop.

A few weeks ago, after having been on sick leave for several weeks, I opened my work laptop to do some of this photo transferring. But the iCloud would not sync. Eventually, I disabled and enabled the whole iCloud sync, and, well, it synced. but not the whole 1000 photos as it should. Now I have 300 photos in my photostream and a couple months missing from both the stream and my hard drive. And iCloud will not sync them - nor the newer photos again...

So, yey, I had two options:
1) connect my iPad to my laptop and fiddle with iTunes or
2) copy photos to Dropbox on iPad and then transfer them from Dropbox to hard disc on laptop

Guess which one I went for? Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes and all the other similar apps that are meant for convenient backupping etc. of the devices, but seem to do whatever they please instead of letting me be in control, and have a confusing UI & UX on top of it? Yeah, I added approx. 800 photos to Dropbox. 670 remaining to be uploaded. We could have a faster wi-fi, you know.

I would be cool to be able to connect the usb hard drive straight to the iPad. And it would be cool to have a working cloud sync. OneDrive offer autoupload of the iPad camera roll nowadays too, did you know that? But it still does not include th camera uploads from my Smasungs to the iPad, and some app-modified pics either. In many ways, the logic of what is in "photos", what in "camera roll", whart in "photostream" and how all of these are linked and cloud synced, is still a total mystery to me on the iPad.

About Videos

I have a very ambivalent attitude towards videos. I like them when e.g. I miss a performance by one of our girls and I can then see it on video taken by someone who was there to video it. But videos posted in Facebook, or on news sites etc. I don't click almost ever. I like to look at photos much better. Besides, I encouter fundamental problems with videos in more ways than one.

For most of my daily Internet surfing I use my iPad. Work laptop is for work, and home laptop is mostly used by the kids, and way too clumsy anyway when sitting on the sofa relaxing. I use my iPad on the bus for morning news and facebookin, and at home for almost anything I do.

My iPad is jailbroken, and I use the user agent faker with the Safari, for the general better user experience. But this creates a problem with videos: most web sites (including Facebook and Youtube) feed the videos to iOs Safari in HTML5 format, but for the Chrome desktop UA I use, they send them as flash videos. And iPad does not support Flash. See where I'm going? I usually don't watch videos because I can't without changing the UA, and it's just not worth it. I like still photos and written news better any way any day.

So ok, this is a minor issue, and solely my personal problem (though I generally don't even consider it more than a nuicanse - I believe in one HTML5 standard anyway and think videos should be served as such anyway). But the thing that really ticked me off today, was my futile attempt at getting some videos out of my Lumia (820, don't think that actually matters) and onto my iPad so that I could a) share the video in Facebook and b) more importantly use it in a blog post.

Was it easy? No. Did I succeed? So far, no.

Photos are automatically saved to Sky... 'scuse me OneDrive. I fully understand that it is not very economical to be auto-uploading videos, so they remain on my phone until I manually do something with them. Today, I picked the best ones I wanted to save on my hard drive and the one I wanted for that blog post and manually uploaded them to OneDrive. Then I opened OneDrive storage on my iPad and was prepared to download at least that one of them, let's call it dog video, to my iPad.

Did it work? No.

For photos, there is download. But for videos there is only open in another app. Which downloads the video and opens it in some other app. My option were iMovie, Documents and Dropbox. I thought iMovie was a rather obvious choice, and everything went smoothly until the iPad opened iMovie - it told me that only audio files are supported. Um, what?

I tried sending the video to myself in my email, and at first thought that wouldn't work either. I usually use the Gmail app for my gmail, and that had the same options for the video download as OneDrive. But the native iPad mail app came to rescue - there I was finally able to get the video and save it to my camera roll.

So, as for the options of getting videos from your Lumia to some other device/storage, you can either use a laptop and

1. connect phone to it by cord and copy it in file system or via the dedicated app or
2. upload video to OneDrive and retrieve it from there on your file system or
3. send it in email and retrieve it from there on your laptop.

But if you want it on your iPad, you need to send it to yourself in email and use the native Mail app on iPad. Ok, I did not explore the Dropbox option, but I'm guessing it, as a third party app, would work pretty much the same as the OneDrive or Gmail apps.

Much ado over nothing...

P.S. I later discovered that Blogsy does not regard videos in camera roll, nor did it retrieve it from Facebook where I already had shared it straight from my phone, so in order to have my own video in a blog post, I apparently need to go get my laptop after all. Eyeroll.

Upgrading to Lumia 820

Last week I grabbed the opportunity to upgrade my phone (at least for the time being) from that faithful snowwhite Lumia 800 that's accompanied me to so much, and taken a *few* hits along the way to a new white Lumia 820. Oh, I know it's not a new model anymore, and that there're newer Nokias available, and that it's not high-end, and that there's newer iPhones availble too. But I like the Lumias, and I like the smaller size phones, and as a phone user, I'm not really that demanding.

I think I have listed before the features I most use on a phone (apart of using it as a phone and for texting), but let's approach the Lumia 820 from this point of view. What do I expcect from and appreciate in a phone, and how does the Lumia 820 meet those.

• Email. No matter how much the media shouts that email is sooo last year because of Lync and Skype and whatnot, it's not. I love both and more, but I could not imagine working in a way where customers Lync m every time they have something to ask or say. Seriously! I need my peace to work. Email gives me the freedom to react when the time's right for me. And it may be in the bus or on the lake side or the sofa in between two episodes of Breaking Bad. And that goes for personal email too. I don't think I need to be available 24/7 - and besides, people can always call me.

As for Lumia 820, it meets my requirements as well as any current smartphone. Nothing new, but then again, no bigger needs either, than to be able to read and reply, search and sync. And I like it that the WinPhones separate different email accounts by deafult, unlike e.g. the iPad.

• Calendar. I'd be lost without it! I use only one calendar, the Outlook one on the company Exchange server. I use it for work stuff and personal stuff alike. No matter how well Googles and Hotmails and whatnot claim to be able to merge their calendars on different devices into only one, I have realized that for me, this is the only real option in order to keep my mind from being scattered.

Lumia (either one) actuallky would handle the merging ok, but I still want only one calendar. And that is just fine by the phone too ;)

• Camera. I have a semi-proper camera I use mostly. A Samsung Pro with an ok lense and possibilities for quite ok photos (yes, I'd like a better one, but it's on the very bottom of the priority list of things I'd need or want, because it still works ok for my purposes). And I have a pocked model, some years old cheapie I got in the middle of my divorce, just to have something. That one I use quite rarely. Even more so, since the phone cameras are now more or less as good.

The camera is one of the best features in Lumia 820. It comes with a high-res 8MP camera with focus assist light (a feature well appreaciated by me, for it enalbes taking good quality photos in lesser light without needing to use the flash), options to select the ISO and choose between 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio and a few other settings. For a more detailed review, see this TechRadar article about Lumia 820 camera.

Lumia 820 also has an inbuilt (or downloadable, but at least for me, they were readily available) set of different photo lenses, or apps, such as the Nokia Panorama which proved to be a pretty able panorama photo app, Nokia Cinemagraph for creating animated photos (but I think you can only see the effects in the app, not elsewhere) and Nokia Smartcam, with fun effects for capturing movement and then applying one of several ways of handling it, e.g. removing a moving object, or overlapping the frames.

And you can download plenty more.

• Skype and WhatsApp. I don't launch Lync on my phone almost ever, but I do use Skype on my phone occasionally (my mother lives on the other side of the world) and WhatsApp is the messaging app of choice for my daughters, ever since they had an almost 100€ SMS bill. So I, too, started using it with them, and a few others as well.

As for WhatsApp, it's just WhatsApp. But as for Skype, Lumia 820 has a front camera unlike the 800. And the incoming video was clear and sharp, unlike on ANY other device I've skyped on before!

• News, both tech and world&local. I used to use Pulse on my phone, for lack of Flipboard. For quite some time now, the phone usage for news has been very rare, for I've used the combination of my iPad and the phone internet sharing in the morning bus. So last time I tried to read the tech news on my phone, I realized there was no Pulse no more. I downloaded Tech News Now app, and actually like it better. Also, I read the local news on Hesari app, and world news in Google news, using the browser.

Lumia 820? Not much difference, naturally. Except for the bigger screen, while the phone is still sleek.

• OneNote, Googling, Kindle, occasional Youtube, Facebook, Twitter... Apps, apps, apps. Apart from the bigger screen, nothing special about Lumia 820 for those.

Conclusion? I fell in love with the clear a bit bigger screen and the camera - all the while understanding that there are even better ones availbale. I like the little niche feature improvements of WinPhone8 compared to 7.8. Mostly just more options in the settings and such. Oh, and the possibility to use removable storage! Which brings me to my first frustrating encounter with the phone: I needed to refer to the manual to understand where to insert the SIM; you actually need to take the back cover (and the battery) off.