Phone Macro

I really like my phone's camera. I think it takes decent photos for what it is, and it does a very good autofocus, actually changing the distance from the lens to the sensor, which i think is pretty sophisticated for phone cameras. What it doesn't do, however, is take very good close ups of small objects.
I had an old fujifilm digital camera that stopped working about two years ago. That camera had served me well, but it became unreliable and wouldn't save the photos it was snapping. It had a switch on the side to enable it to take close up images of small objects. I imaged that the switch slid a tiny magnifying glass in front of the lens. My plan was to take that tiny piece and put it in place of the small swivel dustcover on phone's camera.

After I took the camera apart, i found it was simpler than that. The switched just slid the lens further from the sensor. This was disappointing because it made my project much more difficult, since the actual lens is about a centimeter in length, one solid piece of glass. After trying to hold it up to my phones lens and take pictures, i decided that punching a hold in some tape and adhering it to the phone would work better, and it did. Observe:


Here's some of the pictures, and a movie that I did.



The last thing is smaller than the size of a pinhead. There are hundreds of the all over the side of my house. I am going to keep my eye on them.


This is inside of a dandelion on my walkway. The longish looking thing looks like a Dermaptera (earwig) or perhaps a Staphylinid (rove beetle). The beetle sits still at the end because the lens is actually resting on him. The focus on anything, it has to be sitting right on the end of the lens, which makes it no good for stalking teeny-tinies.

I'm happy with the lens but i wish I had a way to attach it other than with tape, and that it didn't stick out so much. Oh well.