March 2019

Elevating my Mobile Photography

They say “The best camera is the one you always have with you” – and that’s absolutely right. I sometimes carry my Sony a7 III with me, but often I am only equipped with my mobile phone. Lately I felt like I should get more out of my iPhone X and so I did a bit of research. I might be late to the game – but I decided to invest in the Moment Lens and App System. 

I bought the 18mm (full frame equivalent) wide and the 58mm tele lens. In combination with the two built-in lenses of my iPhone X I know have quite a good range of focal lenghts at hand. 

But it’s not only about using these additional lenses – I realized that with the Moment App I can also have full control over manual settings, a VERY good way of manual focusing and on top of that the ability to shoot RAW images. The results are very pleasing for the fact that the setup is simply based off of a mobile device. I did some image processing on the phone with VSCO cam. It’s totally fine for on-the-go editing. But for the final results I decided to work with the DNG files in Lightroom to really see what I can get out of the highlights and shadows. And the results are quite stunning. 

RAW from my phone: 

Processed RAW out of Lightroom:


This photo was taken with the wide lens and it seems to be less sharp on the right side. Since the lenses attach on a special phone case, of course minimal shifts in position might effect the sharpness. But in general the rendering of the detail, the lens flare and the wide view make a nice package all together. 

Here’s a comparison with the tele lens, also pushing the shadows and saving the highlights as much as I can from the RAW file.

RAW from my phone: 

Processed RAW out of Lightroom:

In this shot I also made good use of the manual focus feature of the Moment app. It works really well. The tele lens actually produces some decent shallow depth of field for the fact that this is a tiny phone sensor. Lensflare rendering is quite decent and the detail on the focused part is very crisp.

From now on I will always have those lenses with me. And even if I don’t, having the strong setting options of the Moment App already gives my mobile photos quite some boost. By the way, the Moment App video features are also VERY impressive. You can change the recording settings to h265 HVEC, amp up the bitrate to 100mb/s and of course choose resolution, whitebalance, picture profiles and much more. 

But for now, just enjoy more photos of beautiful Kritzendorf, a small village close to vienna and next to the Danube with dreamy bungalows.