Last Updated on 05/20/2016 by Chris Gampat
All images by Benjamin Weir. Used with permission.
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“I took it on my phone :)” says Instagrammer Benjamin Weir when we asked about how his iPhone photos have such great, organic bokeh. “I took apart an old digital camera I had and used one of the lenses to get macro shots with a small focal point.”
Ben first got the idea by looking at magnifying glass refracting his garden against a wall. This made him want to play with lenses more. “I had a pretty good understanding of how all the lenses within a lens worked but I thought if I could just find a lense similar to the magnifying glass but much smaller and stronger I could maybe get great closeups with my phone.” he states.
Lucky for Ben, his mother’s old compact point and shoot stopped working. So he took it apart and got the elements in the lens. One lens made everything super wide but the problem is that his phone couldn’t focus through it without another element: which offered macro capabilities. The other element was useless.
Ben fell in love with the macro element though. “I stuck it over my phone lens with a bit of tack and it worked a dream.” he states. “The depth of field is about 0.3mm so keeping it in focus is somewhat challenging but that’s why it’s fun, right? I would totally recommend this as a free macro hack if you’ve got a dead compact camera lying around!”