Smartphone Solar Imaging, Enhancing Photo Lens 2 Pack

Let's get something out of the way first. Solar viewing is dangerous for eyes and cameras. If you want to take solar photos with your cell phone then you are doing the right thing by looking at these. If you want to look at the sun with your eyes keep looking for eclipse glasses that are designed and certified to be safe for visual use. Amazon sells several brands of them. DO NOT be like the reviewer below who used these over his eyes! They are not rated for visual use. Use glasses that are rated for visual use. Eye damage from using improper filters does not necessarily appear right away and it can accumulate with repeated use. Obey the manufacturer's instructions, not the uninformed chatter of random reviewers on the internet.These work fairly well for photo use. I have included two photos, one where the sun is surrounded by a haze of scattered light, one where the background is nice and black. The hazy one was taken through eclipse glasses, the dark one was through this filter. This filter gives you a better chance of capturing sunspots with your camera. I didn't manage to do that in my photo but others have using this filter so maybe today's spots are just too small or maybe I need to experiment more with the camera settings.I needed to dial back the exposure through this filter quite a bit from what I needed through eclipse glasses. The reason for that is that this filter lets a lot more light through than the glasses do. That is one reason you don't want to look at the dun through these. Another reason is that the spectrum of sunlight passed through a camera filter may include harmful wavelengths that are blocked by the visual filters in eclipse glasses.These will give you pleasing photos of the moon taking a bite out of the sun. With more work they might capture large sunspots. But use eclipse glasses for visual observation of the sun!

Was praying these would work perfectly for the eclipse earlier this year with our iPhone 15 Pro Max (my wife and I) as we wouldn't have a second chance - and we got STUNNING pictures. These REALLY did the trick.

A total solar eclipse is a big deal. You may have to travel for hours or days to get there, at considerable expense; you're always at the whim of the weather forecast; and you only get a couple of minutes to observe the spectacle before it disappears forever. You want to be fully prepared for those special minutes, most importantly including your viewing gear.So I ordered these filters well ahead of the 4/8/2024 total eclipse and tried them out on the normal, uneclipsed sun (using the cell phone camera on my Google Pixel 6a). They DID NOT WORK. All I could see a very faint glow or smudge where the sun was. See photos attached to my review. The sun looked extremely blurry through the filter, which seemed like it would be terrible for trying to view the crisp crescent and the ethereal ring-of-fire during the actual eclipse.Just in case, I brought these filters to the April 8 eclipse anyway. I'm sorry to say that the filters performed just as badly with an eclipsed sun as with an uneclipsed one. So I ended up taking all my eclipse photos through regular eclipse glasses. A bit awkward, but it worked well enough for a non-professional like me.I'm not sure why these filters get any positive reviews, unless there is something about my particular phone that doesn't work well with them. (And yes, I double-checked that I was facing the correct side of the filter towards the sun vs. toward the lens.) I would definitely not buy these again or recommend them to anyone.

I consider these filters to be barely adequate for cell phone photography because the thinness of the film causes wrinkles which may be problematic during enlargements. Depending on your phone's geometry, taping them on may cause even more wrinkles.

This was a fantastic find. I was fortunate enough to have my backyard in the direct line of the eclipse and it was a misty clear sky with some clouds. This filter worked so well; it took great shots of the eclipse as it was starting to cover (you didn't need it for the full).You need a filter to take pictures of the sun because a: without it, you won't see the eclipse, b: you'll fry your retina, c: you could damage your camera lenses (per NASA).I was glad I had two because my neighbor's niece, an astronomer (literally her job) was visiting and I was able to give her the other one to use and then gift to her.I used Portrait mode, 3.5-4.5 at 3x to get the shots I got on my iPhone 13Pro.The only "problem" is that I wish there was a way to attach this to the phone, as I found it at times difficult to hold and to take pictures.I highly recommend this filter to anyone trying to do solar photography. As for the total eclipse itself? It wa totally worth it.

I bought a pair of these filters for use during the recent total solar eclipse in the USA. The filters provide adequate filtering to make it possible to photograph the sun. However, holding the filter against the phone's camera lenses while also manipulating the screen and then taking the photographs is somewhat cumbersome. If the filter isn't held tightly against the phone's camera lens, light will bleed in around the filter and mess up the photo. But applying enough pressure to keep the filter tightly against the phone's camera lens wil quickly get taxing on your hands.So, for a few quick photos, it seems to be okay. But if you are planning to take a large number of photos, or mount the phone to a tripod, then a better solution would be a filter that attaches to the phone so you would not need to be concerned about holding the filter properly, and you can just focus on getting the best photos.

Got some great pics of the solar eclipse using these on my iPhone and my son's Samsung.

The quality is good enough for looking at the sun but it will not work if you are using this as a filter for taking a picture.