Smart glass

As smart as modern smartphones are (and they are smart) their cameras tend to offer us fewer focal length choices than we are used to with even the most basic compact zoom camera. This can make shooting portraits or distant subjects more difficult, as getting close to fill the frame leads to distortion and digital zooms reduce our pixel count. Sometimes, too, a smartphone camera’s lens just isn’t wide enough, and even though many have stitch panorama modes that can help with a wide vista or an enormous dramatic interior, it can be tricky to make them perform well.

A solution to all these problems has been on offer well before the dawn of the mobile phone camera, as we have used wideangle and telephoto converter accessory lenses on compact cameras and even box cameras since the earliest days of photography. Macro adapter lenses have been, and still are, a popular and simple answer for the occasional close-up and they have proved themselves very useful.

Here we have brought together three quite