No way, can my phone really do that?

Camera phone - It may do more than you think.

Although I am a diehard DSLR fan, albeit being dragged to the mirrorless kicking and screaming, I do use my cell phone to take pictures.  In fact, I am teaching a course on the subject and just recently produced my Cell Phone Photography Book - 2nd Edition.  I have discovered a great deal about cell phone camera capability in putting the course together.  The photo above is a case in point.

People don't usually need to make large images when taking a photo, often something around 10 megapixels (MP) is enough.  Most cell phone cameras will create a 9 MP or 12 MP image with the front-facing cameras.  The rear-facing camera, the one you use to take selfies of, is smaller, coming in at about 5 MP.  Those pixel counts are all you really need, most of the time.  The rear camera is used for social media while the front cameras may be called on to produce prints or require cropping.

My Android phone has 3 front cameras, the main one (1x power) has a 48 mp sensor.  When you take a photo with any of the three cameras, a 12 MP image is formed, regardless of the camera selected.  Larger images are not necessary, take up a lot more memory, and are cumbersome to work with in certain apps.  However, there are times that you need more - a lot more.

One way to achieve this is to do a panorama.  The scanning process results in a large file size because of the pixel dimensions you end up with.  You can use this file to do serious cropping or to produce a very large print - both will result in a very impressive image.  But there is another way to take a high-resolution image.

Notice the file ratio format shown at the top of the above image.  By choosing to expand the ratio icon in your camera's control menu, you should get a menu bar similar to the one shown.  They all produce images with those ratios, but all of them are going to be around the 10 MP mark.  Notice the far left option.  It gives you the ability to make a 3:4 aspect ratio image, but at 48 MP.  This will allow you to use the full capability of the camera's sensor to capture a picture.

The 48 MP image can be used to crop an area (notice the right inset) and still retain detail.  More importantly though, you can use that 48 MP image to make an impressive enlargement.  How big?  A 18x24 inch print would not be a problem, and you could easily enough produce a decent-looking 30x40 inch photo if needed.

So, why not use this image size all the time?  Well, you can't zoom in or out to begin with.  Your file sizes will also be large (the above image uses over 11 megabytes of space, about 4x larger than a regular shot) meaning there will be less room on your camera's memory for storage.  And some of the other features may not function.  For example, I can't use burst mode when shooting at the high-resolution setting.

The moral of the story then is to use the high-resolution feature of your camera phone only when you have a really special photo.  That way, if you want to, you can do something special with it.  Then put it back to the regular way.

How awesome is that!

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com