Smartphone Photography

By Roger Carter

Want to take good shots with your smartphone? This short book tells you how. It explains how the camera works, how to use it in both Auto and Manual modes, and how to compose the shot. It also explains how to edit your photos using some of the top editing apps for smartphones: Google Photos, Snapseed, and TouchRetouch. It is aimed at Android users, but mostly applies to Apple iPhones as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roger Carter
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463015094

Roger Carter

Roger Carter has had a varied career, including working as a studio manager at the BBC, working for the British Overseas Civil Service in the Solomon Islands, and running his own business. From 1975 to 2000 he was a lecturer at what is now the Buckinghamshire New University, and during this time he wrote 20 student textbooks, including Quantitative Methods for Business Students, and Business Administration for the Computer Age (both published by Heinemann) as well as books on information technology and computer software (various publishers). He is now retired and lives with his wife Sandra in Buckinghamshire, England. They have two children and five grandchildren. In 2018 he helped set up the Bourne End & District U3A and became its first Chair, and in 2021 was appointed its Honorary President..

Book preview

Smartphone Photography

By Roger Carter

Copyright 2021 Roger Carter

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 The Smartphone Camera

2.1 How Cameras Work

2.2 f Numbers and Depth of Field

2.3 ISO

2.4 White Balance

2.5 Wide-Angle and Zoom

2.6 Resolution

3 The Camera App

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Auto and Manual Modes

3.3 Assistive Grid

3.4 Camera2 API

3.5 Introducing HedgeCam 2

3.6 The HedgeCam Screen

3.7 Quick Focus and Brightness Control

3.8 Exposure Compensation

3.9 Zoom

3.10 Photo Modes

3.11 Photo Settings

3.12 Viewing your Photos

4 Composing the Picture

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Focal Point

4.3 Rule of Thirds

4.4 Leading Lines

4.5 Frame your Subject

4.6 Foreground Interest

4.7 Leave Space

4.8 Simplify the Picture

4.9 Make Use of Colour

5 Photo Editing

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Google Photos

5.3 Snapseed

5.4 Editing with Snapseed

5.5 TouchRetouch

1 Introduction

My Android smartphone, bought at John Lewis, cost £120. The camera components - lens, sensor, and associated electronics - probably accounted for about £20 of that sum. The apps that I downloaded from the Google Playstore to take and process the photos - a camera app and some photo-editing apps - were free. And in many situations the photos that I can shoot for that tiny sum of money are actually better than those produced by the digital camera I purchased several years previously for ten times that amount (around £200), and the editing apps on my smartphone are more capable than those I had previously used on my computer.

That’s pretty amazing. However, my older and more expensive digital camera does have some advantages. It has a much bigger lens, able to capture more light, and so can cope better with dark scenes. And that lens is able to zoom optically and therefore take much better photographs of distant objects.

But these limitations aside, my budget smartphone is a truly remarkable piece of technology with enormous potential for capturing, processing, and communicating all kinds of data - including the images captured by its surprisingly good camera. And it’s a very clever camera, with an Auto mode that allows me to take good photos without having to think about shutter speeds, exposure, focussing, or anything at all technical. As we