Many people ask me how to achieve good looking pictures with mobile phones. Most mobile phones today have cameras but producing a decent picture is not as simple as it looks. The main problem is the optics or lenses that these phones carry. With few exceptions such as Nokia Nseries, the LG KU990 Viewty or the SonyEricsson Cybershot series the optics it very low quality. Therefore, the quality of the photos produced is not that great.
How do I define a good picture?
I’m really not going to get into the artistic elements of photography. First and foremost, because I believe that mobile phones bring something new to the world of photography. For the first time ever, cameras are everywhere. You don’t have to plan and take a camera with you - it is just there with your mobile phone. As a result occasional photography or point-and-shoot pictures are much more common than before. You just take your phone out and shoot.
The goal of this post is not to turn everyone into an artists, but to make sure that you get the most of the cameras many of us carry around.
So to answer my question, for the purpose of this post I define a “good picture” as a picture which is:
- technically good in terms of exposure, colors, contrast and sharpness; and
- delivers the subject of the picture as the person taking the picture intended
The Toolkit we need
There are few items we need before we dive in:
- A Mobile phone with a camera
- A PC
- A photo editing software - I use GIMP which is Open Source and has all the required functionality
The General Idea
There are few things that you can do to improve the overall quality of the photos and assure that you produce good photos. As I said, these tips will not turn you into an artist but at least will make sure that you get the most out of your camera phone.
My top tree tips are:
- Timing is everything. Take into consideration the Shutter Lag of the phone’s camera.
- Don’t rely on Auto White Balancing. Set the right white balancing setting manually.
- Don’t rely on the phone’s exposure settings. When in doubt - under expose.
Timing is everything
One of the major problems with digital cameras in general and with mobile phones’ cameras to a greater extend it Shutter Lag. Not to get into too many details why Shutter Lag occurs, Shutter Lag is the time passes from the moment you press the button to the moment the picture is actually recorded in the memory.
Although you may think the picture is taken immediately when you press the release button - it actually may take a second or two until the picture is recorded in the memory.
To illustrate this I used the shutter release test from Shooting Digital (you can also test your camera phone using this test) to examine the Shutter Lag of few mobile phones and my Canon 20D as a reference.
The above table demonstrates two very important facts:
- Take into account the shutter lag when planning to take pictures of moving objects. Sometimes you will need to press the button in advance to capture the right moment
- Keep holding your camera phone in the same position about a second AFTER taking the shot otherwise you will take a picture of something else
Don’t count on Automatic White Balancing
Automatic White Balancing lies. If you can, set white balancing manually and don’t rely on the Automatic setting of the phone.
Example #1 - White Balancing: This picture was taken with the HTC Tytn II with white balancing set to Auto.
The following picture was taken in the same conditions. I just changed the White Balancing to Daylight.
As you can see the colors in the last photo are much nicer and deliver the actual colors more accurately.
Under Expose
As with white balancing, exposure is another area where you cannot rely on the automatic setting of the mobile phone’s camera. Mobile phones’ cameras tend to over expose pictures due to incorrect and poor metering mechanisms. In addition, since photography is not the primary feature of the mobile phone, the cameras tend to use relatively simple/cheap sensors. As a result, the dynamic range of the mobile phones’ cameras is not as good as stand-alone digital cameras.
If you need more info on dynamic range check out dpreview.com it has a great glossary on various digital photography terms.
The important thing to remember is that over exposed pixels are dead. However, under exposed pixels still carry data and can be revived.
The conclusion is - when in doubt - under expose.
Example #2 - Over and Under Exposure:
The first picture was taken with Nokia N82. The exposure was set to Auto (default):
You can easily see that the sky (upper left side) is heavily over exposed - it is completely white. In addition you can see that the colors of the fence is washed out.
This second picture was taken with the same Nokia N82 and same conditions. However, in this case I set the exposure compensation manually set to (-1):
You can clearly see the blue and clouded sky - however, the flowers are a bit under exposed. To fix that we need our Image Processing software (e.g. GIMP, in my case) to fix the levels of the pictures and apply auto coloring to fix the colors.
The final result benefits both worlds - you can see the sky and flowers:
Summary
Mobile phones with cameras are everywhere. With some basic understanding of their limitation and how to overcome these limitation we can produce much nicer photos. Enjoy.
In this post I will take a close look at the 
