Know your handphone camera well.

Back in Jakarta, I spend my week days working at the office and weekend taking a rest. I can’t hardly find a time to take my D3000 out of the box. It’s just been there for three months with all the lenses (my lomo camera too). One thing I do admit is that DSLR cameras are big. Though my D3000 is the smallest among all DSLRs, it still feels too big. It doesn’t fit into my working bag, thus I never brought it to the office or even to malls. It is personal opinion anyway and you may BOO me.

So, now I prefer a handgun instead of carabine. Those who are following my FB page, know well that there was a time around two years back that I took many shots using my iPhone camera. Taking photographs with the iPhone was a lot of fun. It enables you to shoot, post-process and upload it immediately one after another. Though its resolution is only about 2 MP, it produces much clearer picture than my 5MP Blackberry camera. You may object, but again this is my humble opinion. Now that my iPhone has already been my secondary phone, I am not subscribing any internet bundling for this phone anymore. This causes me to rely on my Blackberry camera.

I must admit that RIM does improves Blackberry camera significantly. I remember that around 2009, all shots taken by any BB were terribly noisy. Now that it has much improved, I think “hey it’s not really that bad, let’s have a try’. And now, after I have taken some shots with my BB, I’d like to share about what you must know about any handphone camera:

1. Know how wide your handphone’s camera lens is. Not the dimension of the lens I mean here, though it matters a lot in professional photography, but the focus length. Usually it is represented in millimeters: 18mm is wide, 200 mm is narrow and long. Knowing this well will help you in choosing the right distance between you and the object. You might reply that we can use digital zoom, but the answer is NO. Never use the digital zoom for it only makes your picture noisy. Your manual zoom (read: your feet) is the best zoom technology you have.
2. Set a dedicated button for camera. Ever shot a photo after the moment has gone? I have A LOT. Actually this is one of the weak point of iPhone photography. It takes several seconds until your iPhone camera is ready to shoot any moment. Before there was iOS4 (even iOS5), you can set your iPhone’s home button: by clicking twice, it will automatically load camera feature. But they remove this handy short-cut and loading camera in iPhone takes a lot time. But hey my Blackberry has a dedicated button only for the camera and I give one thumb up to RIM for that.
3. What you see is not what you get. Almost 80% of the time I dissapointed with my BB shots. Luckily I didn’t delete it and after I transfer them into my laptop, I see that actually they are all not that bad. From this I realized that BB’s image viewer does not reveal what it actually shots. So, if you take any shot and you thinks it doesn’t look nice, you better have a second look at your laptop.

Yes, only three and those three are key points. But theory is not enough, you must practice, practice and practice. It won’t make you tired anyway since photography is heaven a lot of fun! What are you waiting for? Let’s take some shots!

To persist, to persist and to persist.

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