Today, I was invited to a family dinner that was slightly to slow-paced for my taste. The food ended up taking an hour to come, and the conversation dragged on from purchasing glasses to Chinese names. I have hardly any experience in the latter category, so you might imagine I grew quite bored. I drew out my Sony Ericsson w600i, which does happen to be a camera phone like all phones made in the last two years, and began fooling around with the camera. Luckily, the restaurant was very well designed and decorated, so I had many items to try it out on.

Before continuing, I’d like to disclose some information:

• My own Sony Ericsson w600i is almost two years old – it has been released for nearly the same amount of time, so as you can imagine, the camera quality will not be as great as one of a w810i or the world-class camera phone complete with Xenon flash, k790i.
• I am not a professional photographer – quite the contrary; I’ve got the interest in photography but definitely lack the skill and experience.
• I am aware I probably looked like a doofus, especially to people who walked through when I was taking a picture. However, my sense of boredom overcame my sense of shame and I decided to go along with such a scheme anyway.
• If you’re looking to put stuff in your portfolio or your school project or even something just as simple as remembering precious family moments, don’t use a camera phone.

We’ll start with my main point: every camera and phone is different, so you’re going to want to experiment. It takes time to find out the optimum settings to take pictures. I realized soon that the maximum resolution was sacrificing response time, so I decided on lowering it to a moderate 640×480 (the w600i has a 1.3mp camera, meaning it has a maximum resolution of 1280×1024). I switched the quality to Fine and mainly tampered with the White Balance, shifting from Incandescent to Fluorescent and then Cloudy. Here were the results; you tell me which one you thought was best.

The next step: how you hold the camera phone will affect the result. If you’re going for the “fly” look and hold it with one hand, it’ll show. If you’re holding it like a normal person with two hands, it’ll show. Some will look much less blurred, some will look like they were taken with a real camera! Because the average human’s got pretty jittery hands, you’re going to want to hold it with both hands, even if it makes you look like a nimrod (unless you’ve got really steady hands). Also, pull the sniper-trick – I read about this in Wired once, if I’m not mistaken: breathe in for five seconds, hold your breath for five seconds, and breathe out for five seconds. Repeat. This is supposed to slow your heart rate (assuming I remember correctly) and calm you down a bit, meaning you’ll have steadier hands.

If you’re going to turn a deaf ear to my advice, and want to replace your camera with a camera phone, common sense will tell you to invest your money in a powerful camera phone. Something like a Sony Ericsson k790i, k850i, or a Nokia N95 costs a sure heck lot more than a normal camera, but if you really want results from a camera phone, then this is what you’re going to want. Higher resolutions, Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, and all the trimmings. Not to mention they’re pretty powerful devices that can do pretty much anything you want them to do.

There really aren’t any universal tricks to taking better pictures, as it’s already pretty subjective to compare which photo looks better from a camera phone: you have to take into consideration the focus (or lack thereof) and the colour capture, not to mention a whole mountain-sized pile of other things. To recap, if you’re resolving to take better pictures:

1. Experiment with your camera phone. Perhaps practise, even.
2. Throw away your dignity and hold the camera phone like a normal person.
3. Invest your money in a stronger camera phone.
4. Thank Herbert Lui for such a wonderful and common-sense filled tutorial.

Have fun snapping those shots away.