Take Good Photos with your Camera Phone

Digital cameras bundled with mobile phones are getting better and better with more megapixels, better quality lenses, storage space, resolution, focusing, video capabilities, facial recognition and flash.


That said, you don’t really need an high-end smartphone with a 8-megapixel camera to take good pictures. A decent camera phone with a 3-megapixel sensor is good enough for that everyday candid, lifestyle shots one tends to take.



The best camera is the one that’s with you

I cannot carry my DSLR everywhere and I am often find myself in such a situation where I see a frame and I do not have my camera with me. As a photographer I am more fearful of losing the moment than fearful of the quality of images that the camera will produce.


I don’t find it embarrassing to take out my Blackberry 8900, equipped with a 3.2MP camera and 2X digital zoom, for clicking a street scene. A good photograph is not always dependent on the device it is shot with. My camera doesn’t make my images, I do. To quote a very popular new media photographer Chase Jarvis - “The best camera is the one that’s with you.”



While one cannot argue that smaller censor of the camera makes it difficult to produce sharp, noise free images, there are a few tricks one should learn while shooting with his/her phone camera phone.

Tips for Taking Good Pictures with your Camera Phone

#1. Settings - As a photographer, I do not like shooting in the Auto mode of my DSLR as I do not want the camera to make decisions regarding how my picture should come out. Similarly for a camera phone if you have options of changing the settings try to change them as per your needs.

Turn off the flash when it is not required. I feel the bad quality of the flash ruins the photos most times and hence I do not like shooting with it and try to get additional light sources in and around the subject I am shooting. If you are shooting indoors and your camera phone has a setting for that then experiment with the setting first. Many camera phones have the option of changing the resolution of the pictures. Always shoot in the maximum resolution so you can capture the maximum details.

#2. Lights - Photography is all about Light, the one that lights up your heart. What is photography but play of light? Even while shooting with the camera, one needs to know how to read the available light looking at the conditions around. The best phone camera pictures are taken in plenty of light. Typically that is when one can try and reduce the noise levels and getter better results.

Different lights impact the color in your images in different manner. If your phone camera has the basic white balance features then experiment with them to get the near possible match. Be aware that your phone camera may not have the advanced features of a high end DSLR but a lot can also be fixed with touching up the images late. Most of the photos shot by the Blackberry have used light to its advantage; a couple were shot as backlits in extreme sunlight to bring out the translucent textures of the objects.

#3. Hold it steady - Do you often complain of blurry images while shooting with your phone camera? There is a possibility it has a slow shutter speed and is prone to blurs with a little shake here and there. Often there is a delay between the release of the shutter and the actual click of the phone. That is the moment when a little movement will create bad blurs.

Holding the camera really steady and even after the shutter is released, keep it steady for a few seconds more just to be sure. You could also try supporting the phone on a few books, table, against the table vase and get sharper images. Having said that, take advantage of the slow shutter speed and capture a couple of good motion blurs images. I usually make use of my HTC Tattoo’s slow shutter speed, which is a nuisance otherwise to create abstracts.

#4. Avoid zooming in - The built-in zoom in most phone cameras are not optical but digital. Hence, it is advisable to not zoom in to compose a picture because you are not really zooming.

Fill up your frame by moving closer to the subject. This is to take care of the issue of subjects looking smaller than usual when shot on the phone which is due to the smaller resolution which is typical of phone cameras. Cropping could be a good solution to that but it can lead to pixilation.

#5. Experiment - Phone cameras allow greater flexibility in shooting. With their compact sizes, they can easily be tucked into that shirt pocket or that tiny clutch. Easy shots at any fashionable get-together or a wedding without carry a big DSLR and appearing clumsy. Experimenting with different angles, compositions is more possible since the device will fit* into any nook or cranny and since a few camera phones have timers it makes it so much easier to get that elusive shot with a little planning.

[*] I have sneaked in my phone when my DSLR wasn’t allowed at the Ajmer Dargah and captured an image sneakily.

Regardless of where I use it I do not miss, ‘missing the moment’ anymore since both my phone cameras given near perfect images whenever I want and depending on how I use them in those light/temperature conditions . These pictures can also be printed on an A4 size paper after proper post processing for optimum output.

12:12 AM | 1 komentar | Read More

Use Google Contacts as a Unified Address Book

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites.

For instance, you may have switched to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a tricky thing.
One Place for all your Contacts


If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a single cloud-based service like Google Contacts.

Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing this:

Step 1: Bring all address books into Google Contacts

Import into Google Contacts

Go to Gmail Settings and click the “Import Mail and Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts.

Next download your address books from LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook, Orkut, and other accounts as CSV files and import them all into Google Contacts one-by-one.

Step 2: Clean-up the duplicates

When you import contacts from multiple places, it is obvious that some of the entries would be duplicates of each other. Google Contacts however makes it quite easy for you to manage these duplicates.

duplicates

Choose “Find Duplicates” under “My Contacts” and the tool will group all the entries that share the same name. Do remember to review all the default suggestions one-by-one as sometimes two people in your contact list can have similar names and you don’t want to combine them into one.

Once you’re ready, just hit the Merge button.

Google Contacts Manager mostly relies on the person’s name to detect duplicate entries. If it fails to recognize all your duplicate contacts, you can merge them manually as shown in the next screenshot.

merge duplicate contacts

Step 3: Enrich your contacts data

Google Contacts now has basic details of all your contacts including their names, email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers and birthdays. We are however still missing profile pictures, website URLs, social profiles, etc.

There’s a useful online service called Gist that may help bring lot of such additional profile details into our Google Contacts. Here’s how:

3a. Go to gist.com and open a free account.

3b. Once your account is activated, go to “Other Contacts” and connect Google Contacts with Gist. Type your Gmail username and click “Authorize and Upload” - this uses OAuth so you can upload your entire Google address book into Gist without sharing your credentials.

upload gist contacts

The process of importing contacts from Google into Gist may take a while to complete depending on how you large your address book is. Take a coffee break here!

3c. Now that all your contacts have been imported (see the progress bar at the top), go to gist.com/people and you’ll find that Gist has discovered tons of extra information about your contacts that weren’t available in your original address book. This includes their blog addresses, social URLs and more.

Let’s now bring this new information back into Google Contacts. Select all the contacts, click Export and Gist will send you a single vCard file in your Inbox.

enhanced google contacts

Download this v-Card file and import it into your Google Contacts. Don't worry, it will only merge the new details and won't create any duplicate contacts.

The next thing that we are missing in Google Contacts are profile pictures. There's a utility called Google Contacts Sync that takes your Gmail (or Google Apps) credentials, finds the matching entries in your Facebook network and accordingly updates their profile pictures and birthdays in Google Contact.

If you are not connected with all your Google contacts on Facebook, you can still bring their profile pictures through RainMaker. This is an excellent service that can populate your Google Contacts entries with photos and social details pulled from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The free account will however limit you to 25 contacts.

profile_pictures

To summarize, we first imported all our address books into Google Contacts, merged the duplicates and then added profile pictures and social details of our contacts.

What next? If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, Nokia (Symbian), BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, you can use Google Mobile Sync to keep your Google Contacts synchronized with the built-in address book application. Android mobile phones have this built-in so your phone’s address book will always be in sync with Google Contacts.

Microsoft Office users may try GContactSync to keep their Outlook address book in sync with Google Contacts (it works both ways). Another alternative is Cyncz – it will first pull all your Google Contacts into the cloud and them synchronizes them with Outlook on the desktop through a plug-in. See the other synchronization tools for Outlook.

12:10 AM | 0 komentar | Read More

How to Export Email Addresses of all your Facebook Friends

Search the Facebook Apps directory for something like “export contacts” and you’ll come across quite a few applications that sound as if they can transfer your friends contact information out of Facebook.


There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.


Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.


The problem is that none of these apps can download what you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.
Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.

Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.


You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.


Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.

12:09 AM | 0 komentar | Read More