momentlens
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Moment's 58mm lens is a portrait machine
When it comes to smartphone lenses, all I ever hear about are wide-angle lenses. More friends in the shot, more of the environment in the scene, yada yada yada. You're popular and you travel, I get it. But sometimes you want a picture of one thing. In that case, what you need is a telephoto lens. They're the go-to tool for portraits and landscapes. Back in 2014, Moment released its first 60mm telephoto lens for the iPhone 5 and 5S. Things have changed since then: Smartphone image sensors are bigger and their lenses are sharper, so using Moment's older 60mm lens on a modern device doesn't yield very good results. There's a lot of distortion around the edges, and it looks pretty soft.
Moment's Anamorphic lens provides epic looks
When Moment announced an anamorphic lens, it really caught my attention. After all, the film Tangerine was shot on an iPhone 5S using an anamorphic lens from Moondog Labs, so I was excited to try my hand at a more cinematic look. But what is an anamorphic lens? And why does it look so weird? The first thing you'll notice about the Moment Lens Anamorphic is that it's rectangular instead of round, like most lenses. That's because the elements inside are rectangular, and if you look closely, you can see the glass inside bend around horizontally. This curve effectively squeezes 33 percent more of the scene onto the sensor. In fact, the technique was popularly used to squeeze widescreen video onto 35mm film, which has an aspect ratio of 3:2 instead of the now-ubiquitous 16:9.
