Moment is a company that makes photography and video equipment, including lenses that attach to camera phones, allowing you to step up your mobile photography game.  I’ve written blog posts about their fisheye, macro, and anamorphic lens recently.  About two weeks ago, I bought a fourth lens of theirs, the telephoto.  

Like their other lenses, it came nicely packaged, with a little carry pouch and lens cap.  

This is a very solidly built lens. It is bigger and heavier than my other three Moment lenses.  

If you own an older iPhone model that has only one camera lens, attaching this telephoto lens to it would double the optical zoom: you’d go from 1x to 2x.  I am currently using an iPhone 11 Pro.  The phone has three lenses: the wide (1x), the ultrawide (0.5x) and the telephoto (2x).

If you were to mount this lens on the iPhone 11 Pro’s 1x lens, it would provide you with an optical zoom of 2x.  There’s no reason to do that, though, because the iPhone 11 Pro already has a 2x lens.  Instead, you’d want to mount this lens onto the iPhone 11 Pro’s 2x lens.  This would double the optical zoom to 4x.  

However… you can’t do this using the native iPhone camera app.

If you try, this is what you’ll see:

But… you can do it using Moment’s camera app, giving you true 4x optical zoom.

Here’s the view of a nearby hotel from my apartment window at 1x:

Here’s the same view, using the iPhone’s built-in 2x lens:

And here’s the view using Moment’s telephoto, mounted to the 2x lens, using the Moment camera app.  

Nice zoom, and pretty clear.  I find the telephoto to be my second most used lens, after the fisheye.  

In the past, if I was using my iPhone’s 2x lens and I still wanted to get closer to my subject, I would just use the digital zoom, spreading my two fingers on the screen to zoom in.  Later on, however, when I would upload the photo on my computer, it wasn’t very sharp.  Digital zoom causes you to lose a lot of detail.  Your best bet is to just move closer to your subject, physically.  That’s not always possible, though, especially if you want to take photos of birds, because if you try to move closer, they often fly away.  With the telephoto, I can get closer to birds if I need to.  Not that New York City is any kind of bird paradise.  It’s mostly pigeons and sparrows.  I like them, though.  So, here are two photos of birds that I recently took using the Moment telephoto lens:

I overdid it with the saturation on the pigeon photo, but still… look how clear the feathers look.  And I love the expression on that little sparrow’s face.  

The telephoto lens is definitely a keeper. 

Moment – Telephoto 58mm Zoom Lens for Camera Phones

Optimized for dual lens devices, you can achieve ~2x optical zoom when mounted over a single lens camera or wide side of a dual lens and ~4x optical zoom when mounted over the iPhone telephoto lens using our Moment Pro Camera App.

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