Selfie sticks can take your photography down the rabbit hole, and other low places

    In our last post, we talked about using a monopod to give your camera a view from above.

    But sometimes you want to take a camera low, or into a place that's tight. A selfie-stick provides a great opportunity to get unique angles with a cellphone camera.

    Selfie sticks are good for this because they are extendable and you don't need to hit the on-screen button to trip the shutter.

    If you haven't seen one yet, a selfie stick is a device you can mount a cellphone camera on and, using either a Bluetooth trigger or a plug in the earphone port (sorry iPhone users. Blame Tim Cook), you can take a picture by pressing a button on the handle.

    The original idea for this was taking a picture with the front camera on the phone, allowing you to hold the camera farther out than your arm's length, thus getting a better-looking picture (that wide-angle lens on a cellphone's front camera is not your friend) or get more people in the shot.

    I bought one at the local dollar store because the mounting clip would also work on a tripod, but I found uses for the stick, such as doing video.

    But we discovered you can use it to get a camera either really low without having to crawl around on the grass, or use it to view under things or to look inside small spaces.

    We were raising some rabbits who decided they'd rather raise their kittens (yes, that's the correct term for baby rabbits, not bunnies) underground rather than a nesting box in their enclosure. After the litter was raised, we were going to close off the hole to ensure they didn't try to reenact The Great Escape. (They actually gnawed through chicken wire to dig the hole in the first place.)

    But before we started, one of my sons had the idea to see what it looked like inside the hole. So, I got my selfie stick out, put my old cellphone in the clip and hooked up the shutter cable, and we lowered it inside, with the "flash" set to automatic.

    As you can see, we got a decent look at the inside of the rabbit hole.

    No, we didn't find any girls named Alice down there.

    If you're going to do something like that, make sure the phone is secure on the end of the stick, even if you have to wrap a rubber band around it.

 

     *Let's be honest. When a cellphone uses its "flash" it's just quickly turning the LED flashlight on and off. It's not a real flash in the sense of a sudden burst of light as a capacitor discharges into a tube.)

Getting 360-degree panoramas with your cellphone with help from Google

    We've all seen those photos on Google Earth and Street View that show a 360-degree panorama of a subject.

    It gives you a chance to see an area as if you were actually there. When my wife and I were house-hunting after I had gone ahead for a job, we would use Street View to take virtual driving tours of neighborhoods where we were looking to buy, so we could both get a sense of the area.

    While Google uses a sophisticated camera mounted on a car, or backpack for trail views, and dedicated 360-degree cameras are in the triple digits, you can do it yourself inexpensively if you have a cellphone camera.

    If you use an Android (sorry, iPhone users), you can get a VPai Clip for your phone. The golf-ball-sized device, which I got online for less than $20, is not a camera as much as it is a pair of lenses for your cellphone. Each lens captures a 210-degree field of view.

    I know what you're thinking: That adds up to 420 degrees, and a full circle's only 360 degrees. Well, those additional 60 degrees allows the software you download on your phone to overlap and seamlessly stich the pictures together to create a 360-degree photo that you can see as a panorama, a sphere or a "little planet."

    If your phone's only capable of FHD video resolution, the image quality may not be the greatest and you'll have to upsize it to post it on Google Street view, but in the words of Krusty the Clown, it's not just good, it's good enough. Check out this one I did recently.

    But if you're using an iPhone, or don't want to get an attachment for your phone, Street View has you covered.

    The Google app has an option that allows you to use your camera's full resolution and optics to capture a photo sphere. It takes patience, a willingness to have people think you're a bit insane and a pair of steady hands.

    When you go to take a picture, the app will display a dot on the screen for you to line up on, and when you line up it takes the picture and moves the dot to the next spot. Eventually, you'll do a full 360-degree arc horizontally and vertically.

    If you do this, it's important to stay in one spot and turn in place, otherwise it won't quite line up as well, and you might miss spots, as I did in this one of the Alamo.

    Or this one in the torpedo room of the USS Blueback in Portland, Ore.

    But if things work out, you get a reasonably good shot, like this one:

    Let me know what you think, or if you try this, share links in the comments below.

Binoculars give your cellphone real telephoto

    For many people, cellphones are their cameras.

    On the one hand, most of us always have them with us, they're stupid simple to operate and, depending on your phone, can produce a decent picture.

    But they have a few drawbacks. The most obvious one is that most of them don't have an actual telephoto function.

    Most cellphone cameras give you the option to zoom in, but that is a digital zoom. Rather than actually magnifying the image as an optical zoom lens does, digital zooming merely crops the picture and then stretches that part of the image across the "canvas" of the image. That might be fine for a minor adjustment, but if you're really trying to see something far off, it is going to be a pixelated mess.

    Frankly, I consider digital zoom as one of the great frauds perpetrated upon consumers.

    But I saw someone suggest a way to get a relatively decent optical telephoto with a cellphone camera. It involves using binoculars.

    What you do is first focus your binoculars on the subject you're looking at, and then put the cellphone's camera lens against one of the eyepieces and take your picture.

    You get a picture that covers a small part of the sensor, but it's a true optical enlargement of the image. You can crop it and it still looks more decent than a digital zoom.

    Here's a few shots I did to test this.

 

This one is with the camera at its default focal length.

 

Now, we're looking through the binocular eyepiece and you can see the enlargement of the image.

 

 

Cropped to make it square.

    It's not the sharpest image, but it is better than what you would get with digital zoom.

    The biggest challenge is juggling the binocular and cellphone, especially if you can't rest the binoculars on a steady object, like a railing. And since you are using an extreme focal length in comparison to your sensor size (unless you're using a high-end cellphone, your sensor's going to be about as big as the fingernail on your pinkie), any minor movement in your hands is going to make it shake like a major earthquake.

    But it offers a way to get a close-up view. You can also use this technique on a telescope if you want to get a close-up picture of the Moon with your phone.