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By Dick Maybach, Member, Brookdale Computer User Group, NJ

www.bcug.com

n2nd (at) att.net

Most cell-phone camera photos have little lasting value, making their quality unimportant. Howev-
er, these cameras are rapidly improving, and more people are using them on vacations and at
important events. It now becomes important to take the care to make their pictures worth show-
ing, meaning you must now better understand your camera and its software. The quality of your
photos depends more on your photographic skills than on your camera. Good photographers
take good pictures regardless of their equipment, and those with limited ability take poor ones
regardless of how much money they spend or the tonnage of gear they carry. Dedicated camer-
as can take better pictures, but they are usually kept safe at home, while our cell phones are al-
most always with us.

The first step is to recognize the limitations of cell phone cameras.

· Their shapes make them difficult to hold steady, especially while making adjustments.
· They have tiny sensors, making low-light photography difficult at best.

· They reside in pockets and purses, and their exposed lenses quickly become dirty.

· Their lenses are simple with fixed apertures and focal lengths.
Taking good pictures requires learning to compensate for these limitations.

Cell phones’ small display screens hide many sins. Develop the habit of transferring every image
to a PC, whose large, high-resolution monitor allows you to see what you’ve captured, warts and
all. Moving pictures to a PC also makes them available to image processing software and frees
the limited storage space in your phone. Simple changes, such as cropping, exposure correction,
and noise reduction, can make large differences.

You hold a conventional camera against your face with both hands. The viewfinder has optics
that make the image appear to be about a meter from your eye, and there is an adjustment to
compensate for aging vision. Compare this to a cell phone that you hold at arm’s length where its
screen if often in direct sunlight. Clearly, the latter is subject to a lot more twitching, and using a

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