5 Reasons To Adventure With A Wide Angle Lens

Going on adventures is one of the most rewarding things any hard working person can do. I think I can speak for everyone that it would be nice to have the ability to go on more adventures, right? Whether it’s a hike to your local mount, a 4-hour road trip to an awesome lake, or a photography trip to Iceland, these adventures allow us to forget about our lives back home for a second. We get to live in the moment, breath in that fresh crisp air, and appreciate where we are and the journey we took to get there.

Time spent on adventures is so precious, so it’s important to make the most of it. Capturing your adventure with your smartphone is obviously a great way to take home some of your favorite memories. Adding a wide angle lens to your phone is one of the easiest ways to unlock the full potential of your iPhone or Android device. Let’s jump right into the five reasons you should bring one on your next adventure.

1. Easily Get Everything In The Shot Even When Close Up

We've all been there running around to get a perfect angle and fit everything in the shot. It can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience, to spite being in a beautiful location. A wide angle lens, like the Travel Lens for phones, allows you to capture twice as much scenery in your pictures or videos. This makes framing your pictures and videos really easy so you can spend more time exploring and less time trying to get the perfect shot. Your eyes are able to see an extremely large field of view, so why limit yourself to the narrow perspective offered from your smartphone.

Without lens vs. With Travel Lens

Here’s a comparison of the same photo taken with and without the wide angle perspective of the Travel Lens on an iPhone X. In the photo with the lens, we were able to fit the whole abandoned building, bridge and the full details of the waterfall and rocks. When compared to the photo without the lens, we noticed how much detail is missing and how poorly the overall scene is represented. The Travel Lens offers a much more realistic shot and allows you to capture more immersive pictures and videos, all the while making it easier to properly get everything in the shot. They are one of the best ways to capture the true, immense beauty of a landscape, spot or moment.

2. Get Epic Selfies

So you finally get to the top of the mountain, or that iconic spot you’ve been dreaming about. You whip out your phone and start taking pictures. You set up to take a selfie but you simply can’t fit everything the shot. When taking a normal selfie, there’s a good chance that you’ll be occupying most of the image. This means your bound to miss a large portion of the background you came to see.

Without lens vs. With Travel Lens

With the Travel Lens, you can easily capture the selfie, plus the entire background since you're capturing a much wider perspective. In the shot above with the Travel Lens, I was able to capture myself, the entire waterfall, the abandoned building, and even got Andre standing on the rock. In contrast, the selfie that was taken in the exact same spot without the lens only captured a portion of the waterfall and building, and Andre isn’t even in the shot. Sorry, Andre! The shot with the Travel Lens is awesome because it’s so much more than a selfie. I was able to capture the entire scene, which makes for a more epic selfie and an all-around better picture.

3. Capture It As You Saw It

One of the best things about using a wide angle is how similar the perspective of the camera is to what your eye is actually seeing. What does this mean? It means that when you pull out your phone, the picture or video you’re taking resembles what you’re already looking at. This is awesome because it makes it easy to decide when to take pictures and you’re not wasting precious adventure time trying to get the right angle or perspective.

Notice in the image above how without the Travel Lens, the perspective of the picture is limited to only the person. While with the Travel Lens, we’re able to capture the entire waterfall and the abandoned building beside it in its entirety. The additional features included with wide angle lens completely changed the look of the image and is a more true representation of this beautiful spot. This picture was taken using the universal clip attached to an iPhone X and is a great example of what's possible in mobile photography with a wide angle lens.

4. Photos With Better Depth Perception

Have you ever noticed how a lot of pictures taken on your phone just don't do a spot justice (for example a picture of a large building or monument)? That's because tradition pictures taken with your smartphone tend to be quite flat. One of the characteristics of shooting with a wide angle lens is being able to visually judge distances much better. Objects that near tend to appear larger, while distant objects will appear smaller.

Without lens vs. With Travel Lens

The increased depth perception provided by a wide angle lens allows you to take surprisingly realistic first-person perspective pictures like the picture of my feet above. Notice how the picture with Travel Lens picture has a much deeper perspective, where objects that are closer (e.g. my legs) are emphasized while objects that are farther away (e.g. the bridge) appear further away. These types of pictures are a great alternative to taking a selfie as they are a great representation of what it felt like to be there in that moment. Again, it’s easy to see how much more immersive the shot with the Travel Lens is when compared to the standard smartphone photo without the lens.

5. Stop Shooting Narrow Videos

Shooting with a wide angle lens will ensure you stop shooting narrow videos that don’t do a spot justice. This problem is particularly bad when shooting video selfies, where you occupy a large portion of the scene. The Travel Lens allows you to significantly widen the perspective and capture videos that are more true to the landscape. The wide angle perspective makes it looks like the shot was taken much farther away, which is particularly useful when hiking or in tight environments.

The cropping which occurs when shooting videos can make it particularly challenging to fit everything in a single shot since the perspective is so narrow. This is where a wide angle lens for mobile photography can really shine as it allows you to capture a wider and more realistic video.

Picture crop vs. video crop

Here’s a comparison of a video and picture taken from the same exact spot to illustrate the cropping which occurs as a result of switching from picture mode to video.

Why are videos cropped so much more than a picture? Mobile videos are cropped because of the built-in video stabilization, your camera uses the extra cropped area to stabilize your videos. In addition to stabilizing, it also crops to a 16:9 aspect ratio which causes the video to cut out everything happening above and below. This results in significant cropping when taking videos, which is why shooting with a wide angle lens is even more important to fully capture the spot and the moment.

About the Spivo Travel Lens

The Travel Lens is a high-quality wide angle lens for phones made by Spivo. It’s made of anodized aluminum so it’s tough and durable and features 5 high precision glass elements which deliver amazing image quality. Our leading edge lens has low distortion (under 1%) and 100% illumination so you get the highest clarity image with no corner silhouettes or darkening in the corners. The Travel Lens is a combination of wide angle and macro lens. The wide angle lens portion screws off to reveal a macro lens, keep reading to find out what it does.

Each Travel Lens comes with the wide angle lens, a macro lens, a universal clip that works with all smartphones, and a protective travel pouch.

The included Lens clip is compatible with any Android or Apple smartphone and works on either the rear-facing camera or selfie camera. Quickly and easily clip it to your phone and existing case to get that perfect shot.

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Bonus Reason 6: Lose Yourself In The Details With The Included Macro Lens

The macro lens portion of the Travel Lens offers high precision 12 times magnification, which allows you to capture stunning close up pictures and videos. Many of the details revealed from these close up shots are not noticeable to the eye, and are hard to believe that they were taken using a smartphone. The lens delivers beautiful crisp images with low distortion, so you’ll always be shooting with confidence.

The macro lens portion of the Travel Lens lets you get nearly right up against objects, whereas the focus of your smartphone generally only lets you get within 3-4 inches (10 cm) of a subject before losing focus. This ability to shoot close to objects allows you to photograph tiny features, textures, surfaces and living things in a way that’s simply not possible without a macro lens. Minuscule details such as the hair on a leaf, or dirt particles, like on the above picture are easily picked up when using the macro lens.

In this article, we covered 5 reasons to bring a wide angle lens with you while traveling. Before heading out on your next adventure, consider adding a Travel Lens to step up your mobile photography game by getting more immersive and realistic pictures and videos. 

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