hey everybody it's norm from tested and to wrap up this week i
have a photography show and tell to share with you that i think may turn
into a little bit of a small build it's always fun to end the week
with a little bit of laser cutting because i want to get to making stuff so
if you know me i do a bunch of photography at home
primarily with this camera right here that's my canon 5d mark iv
full frame camera wonderful for shooting video as well as taking photos of
figurines products things i'm covering for tested
uh but if i'm photographing or shooting video
of my kid for example or uh my puppy she's four years old now
running around the house running around the backyard i'm not always going to
have my dslr with me and so my main camera
for everyday day is going to be my phone as probably for you as well it's the
camera that we have in our pockets most of the time and having used the
iphone 11 pro for almost a year now i guess
you know has three lenses a bunch of different shooting modes or a ton of
apps you can download for photography and video i find myself
really using in two ways uh most of the time
first for photos vast majority of my photos are with
the wide-angle lens so of the three lenses you have ultra wide angle
wide angle and then also telephoto 13 millimeter equivalent
26 millimeter equivalent 50 millimeter equivalent for four frames if you're
keeping track and i use that standard wide angle lens
in portrait mode i find that the sensor is the best gives me the best
image quality in the wide-angle lens and the portrait
mode has gotten so much better since they first
introduced that feature and so most of the photos i'm taking of
my son of the dog are with that portrait mode
on the 26 millimeter equivalent on the video side though
the thing i'm really liking and really have been using
is the ultra wide angle lens that's the 13 millimeter
one and while for photos it gives you this really almost distorted
fisheye view of the world for video it crops that in just a little bit and
while there's no image stabilization or even the
ability to change focus with this lens on the iphone it's wide
enough that it looks really steady the videos i've been capturing and sharing
with my family and friends everyone assumes i'm using some type of
handheld gimbal or even filming with a drone but no i'm just
holding the camera a little bit low and tracking the kid as he's running
through a playground or running through the yard
and it looks really steady and the fact that it's a fixed focal
length or fixed focal point doesn't really matter
because of the distances i'm filming at and for
video at 4k 24 fps i'm really happy with that
now in the world of smartphone photography and iphone photography of
course there are a bunch of companies that do
aftermarket lenses you can buy lens attachments that give you
all sorts of different looks and stylized looks um
for your phone video or photos and one of them for a moment a very
popular one but another one is sandmark and they
recently sent me a range of their uh iphone
lenses and i've been using a bunch of them so i want to go over a few of them
with you today i'm going to start with the the
wide angle the ultra ultra wide angle they're fish eye lens
and that's this guy right here it's a 10 millimeter
equivalent so even wider than the ultra wide angle
on the phone and here it's a really really stylized
look i do like that the lens element lens stacking they have here gives you a
pretty clean image from edge to edge and this does mount on top of the 26
millimeter standard all of these actually mount on
top of the 26 millimeter iphone lens that has the best sensor
it's going to get the best light it's going to have the best image
stabilization and when you put the fisheye 10
millimeter on top of that you can shoot some
pretty cool video and pretty cool photos but really
a niche case not something that i'm going to use for or
default to for my standard photos uh it's going to look if i want to get
really close to something or the examples you see here again that's
where i would use this moving up there is a wide angle
lens that they sell this is a 16 mil so it turns
your 26 mil into 16 mil and you know i found this almost a little bit redundant
in terms of what's already on offer in the iphone the iphone has a 13mm which i
love for video has a 26mm they love for photos and so
the 16mm here you know while it is wider than what you
get out of the box on the iphone it's the image quality isn't that
different enough and the video isn't wide enough uh isn't
unique enough that i'm finding myself putting this one on a lot you know it is
kind of a little bit extraneous the same i think could also be said for
their telephoto lens they have a 60 mil one no it does look better
than the 50 mil on the iphone and with that longer focal length you do get
a little more flattering images for portraits
for people um but it isn't all that much different at least different
enough from the 50 mil that you get on the 11 pro
that it i think is worth the investment something that is unique though in their
lineup is a macro lens and this one i had a lot of
fun with especially getting really up close of
course you're going to do your standard looking at the tips of your fingers
or coins but for me it's about finding detail
on the painted figures that have the sixth scale figures getting right up
close to their faces and getting all the details their
sculpts and the paint jobs and this macro lens you kind of have to
get super close uh because you're limited in
terms of how much you can actually focus on with
that it is a niche case but it is something that you absolutely
cannot get with your phone unless you buy
a third-party lens attachment what ended up being my
favorite lens to use though from the sandmark lineup
it was their anamorphic lens this is primarily a design for video and
you know like a cinema camera's anamorphic lens it does exactly that it
makes a super wide image a distorted image
actually because it's using the same 4k sensor for video as you would get out
of the box here and you have to de-squeeze the
video so you can use an app like filmic pro or you can do it in
adobe premiere pro super easy to do that and if you don't
squeeze the video um you you do see it stretch and you see
exactly what that effect is so it's kind of
it's getting you extra that horizontal field of view
but vertically it's it's not giving you extra field of view you have to compress
that image they're not square pixels essentially um and the kind of cinematic
looks you get with an anamorphic lens when calibrated properly
they they look cinematic they look like professional video
production it's just very luxurious in terms of the space
in the frame which you can have a subject move and the type of
action you can get even for static subjects and things like landscapes get
really really cool visuals with an anamorphic
lens so that's their range of the the five lenses they offer
and in terms of the way they mount on to the phone you see i have them all
on their cases here um but they're not locked into the cases the lenses do come
off but the way they screw on to the case
because you have to use either a case or their clip that i found a little bit
clunky the threads were always perfectly aligned and so
for me it was a little bit of a kind of an extra step to
take it out of the box remove the lens caps put the case on i usually don't
like traveling with a case um and that extra step really
prohibited me from using these as often as i would like to and so
and each of these do come with a case and i didn't want to throw them away
so my solution is to keep them on the cases
right i'm going to keep these on the cases and so i can swap
the cases as opposed to the lenses um but then the problem becomes how do i
store them it's not going to be like in a bag it's
they don't stack easily to fit in my camera bag and the
last thing i want are for these to sit in a drawer or in a cubby in my
office here i want them to be easily accessible
for when i want to use the lenses for those unique shots
and so currently i have them honestly just stored in
a cardboard box and i'm sorry to say that that's what i that's the solution i
have and so i want to have a better solution and design something
and i think i have an idea because while i can't
stack these like side-by-side this i can stack them
like this to save a little bit of space i
do think i can design a type of tray to kind of store all these lenses in a way
and label them to make them easily accessible uh as
well as have them nicely stored and kept safe
uh so we're gonna head over to illustrator i have a design
that i've sketched up and then head over to the laser cutter and
see what we can whip up
all right i got way too excited with this build i may have gotten ahead of
myself with the assembly without showing you guys but
here we are this is what i've fashioned as a storage tray
for these lenses what you saw design was basically
this interior that's why i had in my head
i knew i couldn't stack the lens cases um kind of back to back but i could
stack them interlock so i couldn't really i didn't
want to store them like this but i did want to store them like so
and so i did some measurements with my calipers
figured out what the kind of thicknesses i would need for
the accommodate these cases here and i didn't need it in full height because i
could have them basically stored basically half the
the height of uh the case itself uh and let's do a test um i did encase
the acrylic tray in a wood frame here just for aesthetic purposes and for
ease of uh traveling and moving around but if we
put them let's see we'll go try it this way
yeah here we go and like so oh this is looking pretty
good give myself a little bit of buffer room
on all the sides there we go and this goes like so
and like so that is not bad
at all and i left some space for you know their extra cases
that they include i want to throw away these accessories and so i have places
to store them even like right here a cleaning cloth of course
throw that in there
and yeah
i'm pretty happy with that this is my solution
for storing this third-party lens and case accessory it's almost a
little bit like um like a tray for watches
uh that's what inspired me to to make this and
i'm really really happy with how this fits together
much more presentable uh than uh the cardboard box that i had them in
and i may even design a lid to fit on top of this
something maybe clear or frosted acrylic just to add
some extra protection um definitely want to label these that's
what i'll do next but it's very simple then for me to grab
one of these and then pop them on my phone and
take a photo or a video that is super cool okay we'll do a little bit more
dressing to this case uh build a lid and wrap up the project
all right time to wrap this up and here it is
my complete iphone 11 lens set in a custom made tray i made a little
bit of a acrylic hood on top just to protect it
from some dust but if we pop this off
then we'll see that here it is all the lenses plus accessories
nothing thrown away put some gaff tape on the side
use a white out pen to label them so i know i got from my
10 millimeter all the way to 60 the macro
and my favorite the anamorphic and then of the label here
and this was a really fun project really pleased with how this came out
and having your gear your tools uh nicely organized and displayed
even for me at least encouraged me to use them more they're not going to just
be stuffed in a drawer or thrown in a bag i'm really pleased with how
this came out and i look forward to incorporating these lenses
in some of the future videos that we shoot i hope you enjoyed this project
and this show and tell if you use uh third-party
lenses for your smartphone let me know what your preferences are and what your
experiences have been we'd love to hear from you
uh well happy weekend we'll be back with more builds more projects
in the coming weeks thanks so much for watching and i'll see you next time
bye