If William Blake was alive today, and was pitching an iPhone case on Kickstarter, he might have called it The Trygger. Alas, he dies in 1827, long before either the iPhone or Kickstarter were invented, leaving the fate of the Trygger in the hands of Scott Phillips and Joel Kamerman.
The Trygger is a bumper-style case with a very clever sliding back which houses a polarizing filter. And if you have a nagging feeling that polarizers are the new fisheyes in the world of iPhone accessories, you’d be right — we covered a clip-on polarizer just last week.
Trygger! Trygger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Ahem. Sorry. I forgot you were there. The Tygger has a bumper-style case surrounding the iPhone, and the rear panel is a couple of centimeters too short to reach the top. This lets it slide up and down, swinging into action when you want to polarize some light, and putting the filter over the top of the camera lens.
The filter then twists, its knurled housing sticking out slightly from the case so you can spin it with one finger or thumb. And spin it you will, as this is how you align the filter with the incoming light.
Unpolarized light is regular light, with its waves vibrating every which way. When this light hits reflective surfaces like glass or water, it becomes polarized, traveling in just one plane. A polarizing filter can be aligned to allow this light through, or to block it. The practical effect is that stray light is excluded, letting you cut out reflections, or to deepen the blue of the sky and saturate other colors.
And because the polarizer is pretty much the only non-novelty filter that can’t be added later in Photoshop (or whichever app you use), you need to put one in front of the lens.
The Tygger is an ingenious and easy way to add one to your iPhone, and will go for $50 if funded on Kickstarter. Early birds can chip in with a $35 pledge to get one of the earliest units, should the campaign be successful. Not bad, considering that Apple’s bumper case alone will cost you $30.
