Cameras

As any camera phone photographer will tell you, talent beats equipment almost every time in photography. A talented photographer can produce a stunning image with a pinhole camera given enough time, whereas many amateurs struggle to produce even average photographs using top of the line camera gear. These days, there is a growing movement of camera phone photographers who are out to show that talent combined with a camera phone can produce some incredible photos. Given some of the images they come up with, we are certainly not going to argue.

In fact, the stunning examples of camera phone photography that we have seen led us to investigate how camera phones can be used to produce such incredible images. And so, here is out online guide to camera phone photography!

Camera Phone Photography Guide

There are a lot of things you can do to start getting the most out of your camera phone in terms of the best possible photography. Some of the more obvious things you can do include:

• Maximise the camera resolution many recent camera phones come with the option to increase or decrease the resolution of the camera. If you plan to be taking a lot of artistic shots then it’s obvious that you are going to have to jack the resolution up as high as possible for most scenarios.
• Be Aware of Light Many camera phones deal with low light quite poorly. In general, if you can get a well lit subject then you are going to get better results with your camera phone.
• Alter the white balance likewise, the white balance of shots on many camera phones can also be adjusted. Play around with this setting to achieve the effect that you want. You may even need to adjust this depending on the type of shots you are trying to take so get used to using one of the few controls that you have over the image making process on a camera phone.
• Don’t be shy about taking a lot of shots now, you have to realise that you are simply not going to have the options available to you that many people who shoot on SLRs or DSLRs will. One easy way to make up for that is to start taking as many shots as possible. This simply increases the chances of snagging a good one.
• Get Close The majority of camera phones don’t have great zoom lenses. In almost all cases the zoom is digital rather than optical meaning the image chip simply takes a part of the large and makes that part larger that leads to poorer quality. It is much better to get up close to the subject than to use the zoom on a camera phone.

Recommended Online Guides to Camera Phone Photography

These online tutorials and guides are the pick of the bunch in getting you started towards taking respectable cameraphone photos. Now, you shouldn’t expect to be taking shots like Nachtwey out of the gate, but as the Flickr pool of camera phone photographers shows, you can get some exceptional shots if you learn how.

12 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos A brief and easy overview of photography issues that will be faced by a camera phone photographer. It covers issues of lighting, composition and technique that are unique to camera phones and is a good first stop for getting to grips with this type of photography.

Beter Photos from Your Camera Phone A pretty good guide along the same lines as the one above. Still, a lot of these tips bear repreating. Staying really still might seem obvious, but how many of us have had disappointing shots from camera phones due to moving or shaking? Well worth the read.

Taking Great Shots with Your Camera Phone An old guide written by Darren Rowse (who now runs Digital Photography School) is a good basic overview of photography when you don’t have much control over your equipment. It’s a little dated, but still has some awesome information.

Photopreneur’s Guide to Good Mobile Phone Photography A good little guide from a great site. Includes tips on lighting, composition and post production ideas. Again, it was written a while back, but these types of tips remain important for anyone hoping to get the best out of their camera phones.

Take Great Camera Phone Pictures Timeout tackles the issue of camera phone photography by asking professional photographer, Robert Clark about his best tips. By now, you will see a lot of the same themes repeating themselves (get closer, shoot lots, steady the camera) which should tell you that these are key in shooting decent shots with this type of device.

Camera Phone Portrait Photography Our very own guide on the specific problems and challenges associated with taking great portraits while you are using a camera phone.

Closing Thoughts

If you are determined to show what great images can be taken with a camera phone, then you have set yourself quote a challenge, but certainly an achievable one. One key that is repeated in all of these guides is that planning is paramount. If you can control and plan for as much of the photography process as possible, then you offset many of the drawbacks in shooting with less adaptable equipment such as a camera phone. But as many camera phone photographers have shown, the results can be well worth the effort.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss our upcoming series on camera phone photography where we will cover tips on portraiture, black and white, nature photography and macro photography all from the perspective of a camera phone photographer.

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Ok, so a lot of us are amateur photographers, but there’s really no need to look like a complete amateur when we pick up and point our SLR or DSLR to get a shot. Holding your SLR properly, while not making it totally obvious that you are not a pro, also has a lot of advantages. Here’s what you need to know.

For starters, holding a camera at both sides of the body like the picture below is usually a dead give away that you don’t know what you are doing.

The problem with this grip is that you haven’t really got maximum control of the movement of your equipment and so problems such as blurred photos due to shaking are going to crop up. The slower your shutter speed, the more pronounced these negative effects are going to be.

Secondly, you don’t have instant access to the capabilities of your SLR or DSLR because you have to remove your left hand to use the controls on your lens. This is not a great state of affairs.

Now, while you will have a hard time eliminating camera shake altogether with solwer shots while you are hand-holding your camera, there are a few things you can do to minimise the problem and most of the time, it won’t be any problem whatsoever.

The widely-regarded best way to hold your SLR is to grip the lens with your left hand and use your right hand for the body controls (which are primarily positioned on most SLRs to be most accessible using this grip).

Here is the correct way to hold your SLR:

And here is a great little Youtube demonstration:

Other resources on how to hold a camera:

• Hold Your Camera on an Angle
• How to Hold Your Camera and Camera Phone for Better Results

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Digital photography has changed all of our lives and given us the ability to sit behind a computer monitor and be our own Ansel Adams with the post production. But it’s not that simple, there are several pieces of software to edit your photos with after you take them, the most well known being Photoshop. There is a clear cut rival to Photoshop called GIMP, an open source software that is very similar to Photoshop, and some say better.

Image by Rore

1. Starting with the most obvious and possibly most important, GIMP is free. Yes free, no charge, nada, zip, zero. Photoshop costs upwards of $700 for a single license! The old saying stays true, if it’s free it’s for me.

2. GIMP is a much smaller install, about 20x smaller then Photoshop. Not only does the install go much quicker, but it takes up far less hard drive making it the perfect image editing software for laptops and netbooks where hard drive space may be at a premium.

3. Photoshop is extremely resource intensive, it will run on older hardware but it’s not optimized to and will be sluggish and slow. GIMP on the other hand is amazingly fast and stable. It will install on nearly any hardware running Mac, Windows or even Unix!

4. Gimp is more user friendly. Photoshop was actually created as a piece of software intended for graphics and photographic editing, never just digital photo editing. Because of this it’s bloated with features and functions most photographs don’t want or need. The physical layout of the screen is similar to that of Photoshop, but is also customizable and flexible to fit your needs.

5. Open source architecture means anyone can modify the core code and develop plugins and new features, you don’t need to be approved by Adobes’ development team.

6. Batch processing through automated actions is far superior in GIMP. Because photographers often need to do repeatable actions to large groups of images, this feature alone is worth its weight in gold.

7. Open, edit and save Photoshop’s native PSD file format with GIMP. If you’re editing for someone else, it doesn’t matter if they’ve started the job in Photoshop because GIMP can handle the file format.

8. Free upgrades. Not only is GIMP free to download, install and use, upgrades are free! Photoshop upgrades, which happen on average every 12-18 months can cost as much as $200, on top of the original purchase price!

9. Replicate the look and feel of Photoshop and its keyboard shortcuts in GIMP. There are several tutorial sites aimed at skinning and rearranging GIMP to fully replicate the Photoshop layout if that’s what you are used to using.

10. GIMP goes portable! As if the install of GIMP wasn’t small enough already, a portable version is available to load on your USB thumb drive to take on the go and edit programs on anyone’s computer, anywhere!

With all the benefits and upsides to GIMP and the free price of the software, it’s most definitely worth looking at when searching for an image editing software.

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