Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Cameraphone Photography

There’s an old photographer’s saying: the best camera is the one you have with you. The day you’re faced with a photo op and your multi-megapixel wonder machine is stashed in your sock drawer at home, you’ll be thankful if there’s a cameraphone in your pocket—a cellphone with a tiny, built-in lens that takes tiny, built-in pictures.

Of course, cameraphones don’t have all of the handy settings that you’ve come to adore on your digicam, but they can still take perfectly good shots (see Figure 3-19). Here’s a look at the most common cameraphone settings and how they can help you take better pictures.

Figure 3-19. Cameraphones are designed for moderately close portraits. Head-and-shoulders compositions usually turn out well. But avoid super-closeups: The wide-angle lenses built into most phones can distort your subject. Compose your portraits as shown here; you’ll get the shot and keep your friends.

• Picture size. This option gives you the choice between two resolution settings: large and small. (They would be more accurately labeled small and smaller, but that wouldn’t fly with the marketing department.) Choose large, which is usually about 640 x 480 pixels. You can’t make a very big print with these images, but they’re just right for emailing.

• Effects. You may get a menu of oddball settings called effects. Here you can change from normal color photography to ...