Cameras can’t be carried along everywhere, and for many, cameras cannot be afforded when they are planning to choose between a mobile phone and a digital camera, where the mobile phone is going to serve a multipurpose function, and the camera isn’t. So, when one is going to adjust with a camera phone they need to learn how to make the most out of the mobile phone cameras and capture the best quality pictures.
Here are the tips that can get you the best quality captures from your mobile phone camera –
- First of all, set you mind with a few facts, such as:
- Not all the photos captured can be compared with the quality of digital and SLR cameras
- Capturing images during night time always would produce a compromised quality
- The tips listed below would help you excel in the picture quality for the same Megapixel range of cameras, you can’t compare a 2MP quality picture with a 5MP one
- Your camera isn’t everything you need to depend on, it’s your skills that would make the captures better
Now, let’s see how one can improve the quality of image captures using their phone cameras –
Light the subject / focused area very well
As I have mentioned above, the darker the subject is, the poorer the quality of the picture would be. If your camera phone has a flash, that would be a great addition to the shine and most of the times, would help in improving the clarity of the image. If at all you are shooting outside under the natural light, the flash can be ignored. But if you are shooting inside a room, although the lights are on, you need to try to put some focused light on the particular subject you are going to capture. The lights that you try to enhance in the surrounding areas, by a great amount would help in balancing the colors. From my experience, the cameras of Blackberry and Samsung high-end phones have always taken full advantage of the lights to balance the colors and make the picture natural.
The DSLR cameras have the best flash apparatus which cannot be matched by the mobile phone cameras, but a lot can be covered if you are adjusting the light by not depending on the camera flash of the phone.
Distance from the subject
One of the other most important factors that can influence the picture quality is the distance of your camera from the subject. Photography can be learned even using the mobile phone cameras, and that should be done by taking still captures having the subject pretty near from the camera. Most of the camera phones end up taking pictures with the subject being very tiny and unrecognizable.
Here, you need to stay close to the subject and try to play around with the settings where most of the cameras have a close focus mode to take pictures when the camera is near the subject or being too near to the subject would distort the image and make it totally blurry.
Try to avoid zooming-in
Zooming in would always reduce the picture quality, so try to use the original settings trying to keep the camera phone far from the object, and you can later zoom in and crop when editing the image in your computer. One reason for this is that the picture resolution of the captured images is quite small when compared to that of the digital cameras and the SLR cameras.
Try to keep the camera still
Although you have your hands still while trying to focus on the subject, most of the times while pressing the shutter button you might shake your hand, and this would distort the entire image. You need to take care of this while trying to capture the picture. Many camera phones have a shutter lag, where there is a small time frame between the shutter button press and the capturing of image is present.
Lens need to be cleaned and be clear
The lens is the most important part of the camera, which greatly would influence the way a picture can be focused, captured and then viewed on the larger screens. You need to have the lens very clean and without any scratches on it. Cleaning of the lenses should be done using a very smooth cloth, or there are laptop screen cleaning kits, and if at all you have them, using that would be the best to clean the phone camera lens.
You should also take care that there should be no formation of scratches while cleaning the lens, as few hard cloths or any small particles on them would easily create permanent scratches. You would be lucky enough if the phone manufacturer has a shutter over the camera lens.
Turn off any effects while capturing
The effects of pictures, like the sepia effects, white and black, inversion of colors, mirroring, amber etc. anything has to be avoided while capturing the picture, as the originality won’t be maintained. The same can be done using the photo editing softwares in your computers, and the integrity of the picture and quality is maintained if no effects are used while capturing the picture. If the photo taken in any color effect is opened in larger screens, you might notice how changed and low-on-quality the picture would be.
There are a lot more tips but that would change with the different cameras and mobile phones. The above given ones were the most basic and best ones.
How to capture good quality photos using phone camera