There are many applications of lenses that you may as of yet be unaware of. Lenses are extremely useful for a multitude of reasons. Here are a few examples:
The Camera: Simplified, the camera captures light from an object that is far away and very large. The light is then focused, using a converging lens, on a film. Because of this, it is inverted.
The Magnifying Glass: This is, in essence, a large converging lens that creates a larger image for the person using it.
The Compound Microscope: This consists of two lenses (the eyepiece and the objective lens). The objective lens creates a larger, inverted, but real image, and the eyepiece takes that and creates a still larger, real image (but that is still inverted compared to the object). 
