This is a long way of saying Thank You to F for the Olloclip, the ideal gadget for someone who loves both their iPhone and photography. Literally only available a couple of weeks before Christmas (for iPhone 5 at least), it still arrived before the 25th.

For those that don’t know, the Olloclip is an attachment for the iPhone’s camera. It looks like this:

It sits over the iPhone’s camera. It has three lenses on two sides. On one side there’s the fish-eye adapter, on the other is a wide-angle. If you unscrew the the wide-angle it becomes a macro adapter.

The least useful is probably the wide angle. The iPhone camera is fairly wide anyway. Useful maybe but not as dramatic as the other two.

The fish-eye is, perhaps, dramatic but not useful. Something doesn’t have to be useful to be a lot of fun…

The best of the three is the macro adapter. You have to get it surprisingly close to the subject to make it work. I think this is both useful and dramatic. And still fun.

The quality is pretty decent too.

Focusing so close and with a wide aperture, the depth of field is very narrow but this just adds to the drama. Even coffee beans and Cheerios look out of the ordinary.

And trees look like an alien landscape.

If I had to make one criticism of the Olloclip — and this sounds absurd — it’s too small. I hesitate to put it in my pocket more often because I’m afraid it will fall out, and it’s tricky to use the macro without risking losing the wide angle lens.

Of course it’s difficult to see how else they could do it so this probably says more about my paranoia than anything else.

Overall, it’s great. This is something that’s going to get a lot of use over the coming months I think.