The best camera to use is the one you have with you. You’ve heard it a million times, right?
Treat your phone just like you treat your camera
We keep our camera gear at the ready, don’t we? It’s cleaned, batteries are charged and it’s in our bag and ready to grab when we need it.
Make sure you do the same with your phone. It’s in our pocket, purse, bag and gets set down on counters, tables and who knows where else.
How clean does the lens stay? Take a look — I bet there are fingerprints or smudges on the lens of your phone camera.
Keep the battery charged
This has happened to me before. I’m at an event, concert or out with friends and my phone is on its last bit of charge. Then something happens and I miss the photo because my phone died. This is easy enough to avoid but for some reason, we just forget to charge our phones or think it’s charged, grab it and head out.
Another easy fix is to carry a portable charger with you — they are small enough to put in your purse or pocket.
Use a camera app
Some of the camera apps that are available help you to control more when you’re shooting with your phone. They allow you to set ISO, aperture and shutter speed as you would in your camera.
The Adobe Lightroom app allows you to take RAW photos directly from the app. Camera+, Cymera, Manual and VSCO are also highly ranked camera apps.
Add editing apps to your phone
There are so many options for editing images directly on your phone these days it makes it easy to edit and post on the go. Adobe Lightroom, Snapseed and VSCO are just a few, though there are plenty more you can check out.
Keep some extra lenses for your phone on hand
There are little lenses you can clip over your phone’s lens. They are fun to play with and add just a few more options for you to create with your phone camera. They range from a less expensive version for $25 to the olloclip which runs around $100. Wide-angle, fisheye, macro and zoom lenses are available.
These are all just simple things you can do to make sure you’re always ready to get the shot with your phone.
always have my phone with me, but it can be just so slow to get that spontaneous moment. I use adobe lr mobile to process. phone is good but is no substitute for a decent camera.
I agree there is no substitute but phones are becoming more and more capable and producing better images than they used to.
Seems like every time I try to use the phone camera, I’m in a rush and I touch some on-screen doo-dad by mistake that puts the camera into some weird mode I don’t immediately know how to get it out of. Can’t really see the LCD in the daylight, and the font is so small I have to pull out the reading glasses.
Maybe there’s a better Android/Samsung camera app I could be using – with a lot fewer options.
I always end up wishing I’d had my camera with me instead.
Jim, I completely get this. I dislike using my phone for many things and am not with the crowd when it comes to tons of apps for everything, including the camera. I think too though that it’s a matter of learning to use the camera functions better. Like we learn our cameras so we can use them by feel, we know instinctively what to do. It really could be no different with the phone camera and apps. I, like you, have to grab glasses many times though to see better what I’m looking at on the screen of my phone.