iPhone case allows you to take photos with phone held horizontally

The MirrorCase for the iPhone lets you take photos while holding the phone flat, like an old-timey camera. It seems like a good way to shoot video of yourself, too - just set it on a table and do your thing. At $50, it's a bit pricey. I wonder if there's a DIY version? (I think this is the gizmo used to secretly tape Mitt Romney declaring that 47% of Americans suck.)

• [jmzero]

  How about just a stand that holds it upright?  That seems like it would be simpler, more intuitive, and probably smaller.  If that stand is kind of a mini-tripod thing, it would also work on more surfaces – and you could vary the angle of the camera instead of having a fixed (and seemingly awkward) one. 

  Sorry – or is the main part how you can hold your camera at a different angle while taking a photo? Is that like holding your gun sideways? I suppose it’d be useful for taking pictures of things that are very low to the ground, or through a small rectangular hole.

  (To be clear, it’s a neat thing that I want to like, I’m just trying to understand how you’d use it).

  • [Jim Saul]

    You can get much better cat videos and photos with this.

  • [Itsumishi]

    I’d consider this less about using it as a stand, and more about the ability to compose photos “box browny” style, i.e. holding the camera on its side, looking downwards from above, which does encourage a different approach to composition.

• [Outtacontext]

  Your were right, Mark. Look at this.

• [Jim Saul]

  An easy DIY version would be to use the eyepiece diagonal from a telescope (use an image correcting one from a spotter/terrestrial scope to reverse image flip if necessary.)

• [RedShirt77]

  It looks like it is more about taking pictures and video without looking like you are.

  • [benenglish]

    Bingo.  Mirror attachments to go on the front of your camera to enable you to face north but shoot east or west have been around for as long as I’ve been alive.  This thing enables surreptitious photography by making it possible to face down while shooting straight ahead.  Same tune, new verse, same result – people don’t realize you’re pointing the camera at them.

    Thinking back to when I was a young pup (say, ~1973), I had lots of fun at the local pool with my Nikon F, 200mm lens, and a 90-degree mirror attachment (with 52mm threads to fit most of my lenses).  The pool was on a hill overlooking a large, undeveloped block of scrub land.  I spent plenty of time pretending to take landscapes of that scrub land.  I even took a few actual landscapes, printed up some 8x10s, and kept them with me so that if anyone asked what I was doing I could show them examples of my work.  Everybody in my small town knew I was the local “nerd with the camera” so I was mostly ignored.

    Wow.  I just realized.  I’m not the old perv I thought I was.  I’ve been a lifelong perv.  :-)

• [baronkarza]

  Tape? What do you mean? ;-)

• [Clemoh]

  How the crap is that thing supposed to fit in your pocket?  If you have to carry it separately what’s the point?  A flip down set of legs would be a much better execution of this idea.

• [Hugh Johnson]

  I can haz moar upskirtz!

• [UnderachievingSheep]

  I got this tripod for ten bucks to set the iphone when I want to shoot video clips minus the shaky quality. Not only it allows me to be hands free but it’s a great stand if you want to focus on something with a degree of precision. And it cost 1/5th of this case…

• [Halloween_Jack]

  The thing above is an interesting idea, but seems a bit bulky and inconvenient for a single-purpose accessory. (Edit: I thought that the idea was to prop it up at an angle so that you could use it for FaceTime; that’s not the purpose, I guess, but the fact that it’s almost big enough to be used for that purpose makes my point above.)

• [Bruce Horn]

  It actually could be very useful for portraiture. Medium format cameras with waist-level finders allow the photographer to carefully compose portraits while keeping a personal eye-to-eye connection with the subject that you just can’t get while holding a camera up to your eye or at arm’s length between you.

• [Thorzdad]

  Those “old timey cameras” are twin-lens reflex cameras. 

  • [benenglish]

    Old timey photographer here. 

    Just wanted to make it clear that waist-level viewing wasn’t limited to TLRs.  Waist-level viewing was done with twin-lens reflex cameras, sure.  But it was also done with single lens reflex cameras and non-reflex mirror view cameras.  It was done with all sorts of cameras, large and small.  I have a waist-level finder for my Nikon F, for example.  The thing I tended to love about lots of reflex cameras with waist-level finders was that most of them converted to “speed finders” quickly, allowing me to preset focus and exposure, then put the camera to my face and take a picture before the subject could react.

    OK, getting off the nostalgia train before the journey goes on too long….

• [Chauncey Scott]

  Can I take photos of all the sexy people in public while looking like I’m just surfing my phone? 

• [flappy]

  No.

• [Greg Webster]

  Now if only they’d make it so my Nexus 7 front-facing camera could be used back-facing, so Google Goggles (f’instance) would do the job it should do. It’s my biggest pet peeve on this device.