Three simple tips for improving your camera phone photos

Gone are the days when you had to walk around with a bulky camera to capture those ‘Kodak moments’. Thanks to convergence, camera phones have become the fastest growing division of the digital camera market. However, several arguments have been put forward claiming that the quality of the photos taken using these smartphone cameras could never really match up to that of a good old camera. This might partially be as a result of the lower quality cameras on some of the smartphones in the market. It is however possible to achieve breath-taking snaps using a camera phone. Following are 5 tips on how to achieve those ‘real camera’ shots.

1. Get Close

The closer you are to an object, the more control you have over the lighting. You are also able to get a clearer and sharper picture, especially with a phone like the LG G4. This device has an f/1.8 aperture lens which allows for more light to hit the sensor which results in more detailed shots, even in darker environments. The G4 also flaunts a colour spectrum sensor that allows users to capture  more accurate colours and nail the white balance, which goes hand in hand with the manual mode feature.

2 Crop, Don't Zoom

You would definitely be doing yourself some justice if you could just pretend that the zoom function on the smartphone does not exist.  This is because zooming in noticeably reduces the quality of the image making it ugly, fast. This is because the camera is trying to infer details of what the picture is supposed to look like. Cropping is better alternative because you are sampling pixel information that is already captured and recorded.

Most smartphones have 8-megapixels of resolution and sometimes more on the primary camera. That means you can crop considerably and still have plenty of resolution left for display on the web should you choose to share the photos online. The same goes for selfies, especially when using a camera phone like the G4 that has an 8MP front-facing camera.

3. Edit, Don't Filter

In this age of ‘the gram’, we all feel the need to paint our pictures with the pre-determined filters available on photo editing applications. This is the last thing you should do if you want your images to look unique. These filters are literally used by millions of people across the world and so there is nothing exceptional about such photos. Phones like the Nokia and LG have Additionally, do not add fake blur. Granted, it sometimes is hard to achieve depth of field with a smartphone camera, but applying a uniform blur makes the image look unnatural. If you want the viewer to focus on one specific thing, make it the central object in the frame, making it appear of a more professional quality.

It is with these choices that you begin to create your own style, or even extend the style you've already developed outside of your smartphone. It's a heck of a lot more effective than picking your favourite Amaro filter and slapping it on every photo.