Preparing Your Camera
Practice, Practice, Practice
To get the best results from your phone’s camera, you’ll want to do a little studying up ahead of time. Open up the camera settings and get to know them – find out what the different features mean and how they affect your photos. Practice makes perfect, so whenever you have some free time, experiment! You might also like to review the camera section in your user manual or owner’s guide to pick up extra tricks.
Size and Resolution
When it comes to photos, bigger is better. You can always shrink or crop a photo if it’s too big, but there’s not much you can do when your photo is too small.
Look in your camera settings for “resolution” or “image size” and pick the largest option. High-resolution photos will take up more storage space, but if you regularly transfer photos to your computer (or a cloud storage service like Dropbox or iCloud), this shouldn’t cause problems. You can also reduce the resolution later – 72 ppi (pixels per inch) is fine for online publishing.
Look in your camera settings for “resolution” or “image size” and pick the largest option. High-resolution photos will take up more storage space, but if you regularly transfer photos to your computer (or a cloud storage service like Dropbox or iCloud), this shouldn’t cause problems. You can also reduce the resolution later – 72 ppi (pixels per inch) is fine for online publishing.
Stability
Some camera apps offer image stabilization, which is a great tool to improve your photos. If your pictures keep coming out blurry because you can’t hold your phone perfectly still, look for this setting to help you out. If a stability setting isn’t available, you can do it old-school by resting your phone on a hard surface or leaning against something solid while shooting.
Exposure and White Balance
Exposure is the process that makes a picture – light striking a sensor. Letting in more or less light for longer or shorter periods of time will affect the brightness and contrast of a photo. White balance is a method of correcting colors that have been affected by tinted lighting. Usually the automatic white balance does a pretty nice job, but play around with these settings to adjust the look and feel of your pictures.