My GPS Camera Phone

With this photo, I am unofficially declaring this week as San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park Nature Trail Week or SFHPSPNTW. My family and I went on a trail hike yesterday and found a great place to get away from the traffic and into a green landscape.

The park is huge and has a few miles of hiking-only trails at the southern end where we decided to go. This is a good thing because mountain bikes are everywhere around here, in spite of us having no mountains. I’m not complaining, though. When I used to ride, one of the best places to go was right here in San Felasco. There are miles of multi-use trails at the northern end of the park.

This image captures the decaying remnants of a fallen pine tree that shows signs of a controlled burn at some point. Looking around, you would never know it, but it must have been a while ago. I don’t know the schedule of controlled burns around here, but I can say that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that place when they do it. I never could understand how they manage to keep those fires controlled.

With the huge amount of rain we’ve been getting, I thought it appropriate to post a photo of this storm drain. It’s been busy drinking up the massive runoff from severe thunderstorms that have frequented the area. Thankfully, we aren’t anywhere near the Mississippi River, so flooding is not an issue.

This is also a shot taken from the Nokia 5310 that I’m testing out. I have to say, the camera isn’t spectacular in daylight, but I took some night shots of the kids with sparklers and I was surprised by the results. Come back later this week for the side-by-side camera phone photo comparison between the Nokia 5310 and my Casio G’zOne.  The results are rather interesting.

For most of us, the camera phone is a simple point-and-click experience with no real thought given to making the shot better. Let’s face it, camera phones have a bad reputation when it comes to image quality. However, today’s newer models are paying more attention to the camera than ever before.

In this post, I’m going to run through some commonly found camera phone photo options that you may not be aware of and how to use them. For this example, I’ll be referencing the options of my nearly-indestructible Casio G’zOne, type-V camera phone. The G’zOne camera settings can be accessed by switching to the camera and then selecting the right menu button for the options.

Option 1: Resolution
As mentioned in a previous post, the camera resolution can make or break the quality of your photos. The G’zOne has resolutions ranging from 120×160 pixels to 1200×1600 pixels. More pixels means larger images and more flexibility with what you can do with them. The drawback, however, is that more pixels will reduce the amount of photos you can store on your camera phone due to the larger file sizes. In my opinion, it’s a trade-off I’m willing to take, even with a phone that doesn’t have expandable memory.

Option 2: Self-timer
The G’zOne self-timer feature allows you to set a shutter delay for three, five or 10 seconds. Why would you need this for a camera phone? Consider your body position when taking a camera phone photo: arms extended and raised up, steadied by nothing but sheer willpower. Unfortunately, willpower isn’t going to get you that clear shot. To get the clearest possible shot, prop up your phone, compose the picture and shoot with a shutter delay. This allows the camera to be completely still while doing its work and makes for much better photos. As an added bonus, you can be in the shot, too.

Option 3: Flash
As expected, the flash on a camera phone isn’t going to be much. In fact, it’s usually so weak that I make every effort to avoid using it. The G’zOne flash is interesting in that it comes on for a second, presumably to avoid red-eye, and then the picture is taken. Most other camera phones have similar weak flashes or none at all. If there’s something worth shooting in low light, try working with the self-timer and the brightness settings to capture it before using the flash.

Option 4: Brightness
The brightness setting allows you to manually adjust the exposure level of the camera, providing you with more flexibility in variable lighting conditions. Let’s say there’s a great shot of your friends on the beach, but the sun is blazing and the light bouncing off the sand is blowing out the exposure. An easy adjustment to the brightness level will usually bring the image into something more identifiable. Likewise, low light conditions can be overcome somewhat by increasing the brightness.

Option 5: White balance
For the most part, you will leave this set to “auto,” probably because it isn’t worth manually setting or you have no clue what it’s for. In a nutshell, different sources of light emit different color temperatures, which cast different light colors on your subject. The white balance settings – incandescent, fluorescent, daylight and auto – provide you a way to compensate for the different light you will be shooting in. Auto usually makes for a decent color exposure, but sometimes it has no white to reference, thereby resulting in washed out images. If you really want the shot, manually adjust the white balance to match the light source.

Option 6: Shutter sound
Yes, shutter sound is exactly that. On or off, sound or no sound. Why should you seriously consider this when taking camera phone photos? Let’s say you’re in a nature preserve and you spot a rare animal that hasn’t been seen in years. Quietly, you take out your camera phone (because you forgot your digital camera), line up the shot and capture it. You can hardly contain yourself as you frame the next shot, only to realize that the animal ran off because of that annoying camera clicking sound. Upon reviewing the one shot you did take, it turns out that the photo is blurry and unrecognizable. Nobody believes you and you’re labeled a gold-digging hoaxer, forever ruining your career as a naturalist. All because of the shutter sound.

Option 7: Color effect
With the advances in freely available photo editing software like Picasa, I personally feel that utilizing on-board photo effects is unnecessary. However, if you aren’t into geeking out on processing photos all night, then these are for you. With settings like mono (monotone or black-and-white), negative, sepia and normal, you can achieve neat effects right when you capture the photo.

Now go try it out
Hopefully, this clears up any confusion for some of those unused features on your camera phone. The next time you’re out and about, experiment with the camera settings. You might be surprised at what your camera phone can produce.

Author’s note: In my opinion, the Casio G’zOne type-V is far superior to the type-S, with the only potential drawback being the lack of bluetooth capability. The type-S has bluetooth, but all other features are inferior to the type-V. Compare them and see for yourself.