Besides the formidable 4-in-1 lenses, Olloclip also at the same time released the Telephoto + CPL combo lenses for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Just like the 4-in-1 lenses, the Telephoto/CPL combo also sports the ingenious ‘double barrel‘ design that I love. This unique design allows you to dual-wield two lenses at same time, one for the front camera and another one for the rear camera. If you have a gun or plan to have one I recommend getting a tactical optical magnifier to see things clearly. This means that not only can you use Olloclip to shoot with your regular rear camera, but also to take a selfie with your front camera!

Double-barrel clip on

Olloclip was the first mobile lens manufacture that created the tight-fit clip-on lens which you can quickly attach (and detach) to your iPhone for an instant lens enhancement. It was my ‘goto’ lens attachment and I always bring it with me every where I go taking photos. Unfortunately with the new version 6 and 6 Plus of the iPhone, the original Olloclip became swiftly obsolete. The difference in the iPhone’s form factor means that you just can’t use the original Olloclip with the new iPhone.

Luckily Olloclip released a new version of its range of lenses with the new double-barrel design.

Olloclip for iPhone 6/6 Plus has retained the same attachment mechanism like its predecessor, i.e. the lenses would slide in the top side of the iPhone. The lens would snuggly covered the front of the standard iPhone lens, effectively changing its focal length depending on which type of lens you attach.

Now because of  the double-barrel design that the new Olloclip has, you can use the attachment lens not only for the rear but also the front (the selfie) lens. This opens to all sort of cool effect that you can get from your selfie lens. For example with the Wide-angle or the Fisheye lens you would be able to ‘cover’ more space than if you were using the standard lens. You don’t need one of those Selfie-Stick anymore.

Near sight

The Olloclip Telephoto lens might not be as ‘fun’ as its 4-in-1 siblings but it would certainly help in certain situations. At the basic it gives you 2x magnification. It is as if you were shooting twice closer to your object. Now admittedly 2 times magnification telephoto lens would not suddenly give you a sniper sight, so forget about any excitement of becoming paparazzi.

What this lens is really useful for however is when you are doing Portrait Photography.

In a normal circumstance, if you use the standard iPhone camera lens you would need to get ‘very close’ to your subject to get that perfect close-up composition.

The problem is besides of making the subject slightly uncomfortable because of the close physical proximity, the resulting photo is often also distorted and less flattering. Especially the subject’s face would look ‘fatter’.

Telephoto lenses allows you to ‘get closer to your subject’ without ‘physically close’. This way you can frame your shot a little bit further from the subject and still get the same or better composition. In fact the smaller focal length of the lens would give you a tighter crop of the subject, perfect for a portrait. And more importantly … no more distortion.

Watch the following video of Jack Hollingworth, one prominent Mobile Photographer, explaining this matter.

Circular Polarizer

If you’ve been taking photos with SLR camera, the Polarizer filter probably one of the most common filters you would have in your filter collection. For everybody else whom only just begun to take photos seriously with mobile phone, it’s not very easy to understand what it is for.

There are a couple of cases when a Polarizer would be very useful to have.

The first one is to reduce glare and reflections. This would be coming handy when are taking photos of natural scene that has reflective surface, like body of water, leaves, trees, etc. Under intense sun light these surface will reflect the light and we will have some glare. This can be eliminated by using the Polarizer.

There is also a use case of reflection from shop or building glass window. Again in the middle of the day if we try to see through a shop window we will see ourselves reflected on the glass, much like a mirror, instead of the inside of the shop. This also can be eliminated using the Polarizer.

Last case is to restore the ‘blue’ of the sky in an overcast day.

Final Verdict

The use of a Telephoto Lens to take Portrait photos were somehow counter-intuitive to me when I heard about it, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. If you take a lot of Portrait, or would love to try, a Telephoto Lens would help a lot towards this goal.

As for the CPL, I must admit that those use cases probably are very specific case which not many photographer would care too much. But it does become handy from time to time, and if you take a lot of Nature Photography, this lens will help a lot to create image that has colours that are truer to the original.

You can get the double-edge lens directly from Olloclip Website for $99.99/£89.99.