[ # ] Amazing Macro Photography with iPhone

/* Posted April 4th, 2008 at 7:23am */
/* Filed under Apple, Mods, iPhone */

Let’s play a little game. You’ve probably played something like it before. This is how it goes: I show you close-up pictures (macro photography) of a few household objects, you guess what it is, then I reveal the object in a zoomed out photo. Ready to play? Here’s the first one:

Letter (zoomed in)

Here’s the second:

HDD (zoomed in)

The third:

SD Card (zoomed in)

The fourth:

Cap (zoomed in)

Did you make your guesses? It’s time for the answers. The first object was my Case Logic CD holder. Yup, the letter is the ‘a’ from Case Logic. So how did I do it? Let’s keep playing the game first…

Case (zoomed out)

The second object was the PCB of a hard disk drive.

HDD (zoomed out)

The third object was an SD card. Look closely at the picture, can you see the small black letters written on the back in the upper left hand corner of the card? Sorry for the bad photo, if you even try to move the iPhone closer than seven inches the image gets blurry… like this one.

SD Card (zoomed out)

The fourth and final object is a water bottle cap. Can you barely see the grooves? Sorry, but I couldn’t not move the iPhone any closer than that without getting a blurrier picture.

Cap (zoomed out)

Game over! How did you do? Did you believe that those were taken with an iPhone? Believe it. If you happen to have a decent microscope made for kids lying around or even a real one, you may be in luck. My toy microscope had removable eyepiece lenses with different magnifications (pictured below).

Microscope lenses

What you can do is reverse it so the side with the larger lens (the silver side) can be placed in front of your iPhone camera lens.

Micro-iPhone in action

Keep the lens in place and move the iPhone around very close to the object you want to shoot until you’ve got a clear picture. Make sure you’ve got ample lighting and a steady hand. While most of the photo will be black, you will have a small circle in the middle that shows amazing magnified objects, extending your iPhone’s camera beyond its capabilities. Who needs a $3,000 DSLR lens and $2,000 DSLR camera to shoot amazing photos when you have an iPhone and a microscope kit?