Cell Phone Pictures 1.) Lighting

I have a Nikon D90 DSLR and I love it. Sometimes though you need to take a picture with your cell phone. You can't always have your camera of choice at hand. There are a few things that you can do to make the call phone pictures as good as they can be.

This post will focus on the lighting. Even cell phones with a flash will take oddly lit photos in low light. Cell phones do not have high quality lenses most of the time and the flash doesn't make enough light to evenly light the field. This will cause the closest objects to be washed out and the objects further away to be completely dark. So low light pictures don't make for good pictures with a cell phone. You also get granulation of the image which makes for an ugly end product.

Example
 

The background is completely unintelligible and the foreground is hazy.

This is not what you want. With the proper light you can really capture what you are trying to capture. The same camera captured this next example:

There is a noticeable difference here. There is enough light to capture the details of the subject. It is really that easy. The flash will make a difference but it will not fix poor conditions. It is a cell phone after all.

Many people say that cell phones are just for capturing moments but aren't for taking meaningful photos. That you shouldn't rely on that technology to take any picture that you care about. I don't agree with this. These pictures are posted to Flickr, MySpace and Facebook by the millions. If you take the time to think about the picture that you are taking you can get the best results possible.

One of my favorite Cell Phone pictures in two versions.

Tell me that picture wasn't worth editing. The cell phone is always with you and if you use it correctly you can get some great pictures that you wouldn't otherwise have the availability to capture.

Think about the conditions and do what you can to optimize them. With this post in mind if you are taking group pictures outside with a cell phone and it is a little dark try to position the group or yourself in a place with more light from a street light or something. Whatever you can do to make that picture better will be appreciated by all that view it. I am going to do more of these posts on other methods of optimizing cell phone photography.

Thanks for reading this and have a great day!

J.R.

Comments

[Raywilliom]

Your phone pic is really too good I am very enjoying to reading your post Thank you for this Beauty full post
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