Inside those cheap laser pointers you see in the grocery store checkout line there’s a handy little plastic lens that, when slapped on your phone’s camera, makes it easy to take macro photographs.

In this tutorial, they take the lens from a laser point and secure it using tape and a bobby pin. An alternative method to achieve the same end (and with a higher quality lens) is to dismantle a CD/DVD drive to source the lens and use painter’s tape to hold the lens in place–this is the technique I used several years ago, check out the tutorial video here.

Laser Pointer Macro Lens [via Apartment Therapy]