Using Manual Mode in Android Camera.

So many of the new android phones have manual mode in camera and it is very important to know how this mode works. With it you will be able to take control of your photos, how they look and define what you want to take in photos.

"Manual mode brings in DSLR level control to our photos."

Many small budget phones now have manual camera such as Zenfone Selfie, Zenfone Laser, Moto G4, and various others. So check that your phone has manual mode in its camera. If it has, you are about to have a new perspective of your phone camera.
So you are gonna learn here about using manual mode in you camera.

Let us begin. First of all you must know a few basic things in camera. These are:

1. ISO
2. Aperture
3. Exposure Time

 

These are the basics a DSLR owner must know to take control of its photos. But for phone camera you only have to know ISO and Exposure Time. You cannot change aperture in phone camera.

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ISO is not any abbreviation but it only defines sensitivity of the camera sensor towards light. The more the ISO, more is your camera sensitive towards light. What that means if you are in low light conditions, you should raise your ISO so your sensor will be more sensitive to light and your sensor can read information in little light.

So key points in using ISO:

    Higher ISO:

• When Using in low light.

    Lower ISO:

• When in Dim Light.

However, the more ISO you raise, the more noise is generated in the image. So avoid using higher ISOs and go for lowest ISO. 

      "Noise is generation of fine grains in the photo."

Here in the image on right, there was a lot of noise when taking photos in ISO800. So I increased the exposure time, and took the shot. There were no more noise in the photo.

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Aperture is the lens opening in the camera. It defines how much your background will blur. We can't change aperture in phone camera, so let's skip this.

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Exposure Time is the amount of time your camera gathers light. The more the shutter speed, the more the light it will gather. So if you have lots of light such as in bright sunlight, you need to decrease your Exposure Time, otherwise the camera will gather more light and your photo will be white. But if you are in low light condition, you need to increase your exposure time.

Also the smaller the exposure time, the faster the image will get captured, hence less motion blur. In longer exposure shots, the moving objects will get blurry or completely vanish. So motion is the enemy of long exposure shots.

So key points in using exposure time:

   Smaller Exposure time:

• When lots of light is available.

• When you want to freeze the motion and doesn't want to cause motion blur.

• Doesn't requires steady hand.

Longer Exposure Time:

• In dim light conditions.

• Needs a steady hand.

• When you are not shooting moving objects.

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 When you have understood the above things, there are two more things in manual mode of the camera.

These are 1) Focus and 2) White Balance

 Focus:
 It defines which object will be in focus(sharp) and which objects will be out of focus (blurred).

Focus is generally given as slider in phones as here in my zenfone selfie. When you move the slider up, you focus on distant object while blurring object in the front. When you move it downwards, it will focus nearer object and blur out the farther objects. So you can adjust the slider accordingly.

However, this is required only when you are taking special closeup shots, or you know what to do. Generally, tap to focus works fine for normal shots.

Closer focus(Left),                                                                      Farther Focus(Right)

White Balance: 
 The white balance corrects the colour of light or say temperature of the light. You must have noticed that your photos are sometimes very yellowish or very bluish. This is because the type of light around you. In some phones, it is given as slider for Kelvin scale as in this screenshot. In some, it is given as just a slider or predefined modes of white balance such as cloudy, florescent, etc. 

For kelvin scale, the more you raise the value, the more yellowish the photos will become and bluish if you decrease. That means if your photos are coming bluish, you need to add some yellow by increasing the temperature which will balance the two and give you white photo. Same is true for opposite.

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When you have learned all the controls of the manual mode, you need to learn to implement them. So I will give you various conditions and give you instructions about what settings to use.

Before that remember two things:

1. The lower the ISO you use, the better will be your photos.

2. Under dim light conditions, increase your exposure time rather than raising your ISO. However, for using long exposure time, you need to use firm base such as a tripod otherwise your photos will get a lot of motion blur.

I will give you Instructions soon in upcoming posts about a simple phone stand which you can use to take long exposure shot, which I have used to take photos in the examples in the blog.

Condition 1:

So the first condition is dark environment.

Here is an extreme example of photo in dark environment.
It was too dark, so for the example, I took a shot in automode, without flash.

The photo was took at:
ISO 1540
Exposure time: 1/8 sec.

Notice the amount of noise?
And Barely anything is visible.


So I took another shot in manual mode.

This I took at
ISO 50
Exposure Time: 16" (Double quotes denote sec. So 16sec.)
Without Flash.

See the clarity? 
And the Noise is totally absent.




I took another shot while still in manual mode, but this time, increasing the exposure time to 32 sec.

So the config were:
ISO 50
Exposure time: 32"
Without Flash.

See the magic?

But I must tell you, all these photos were taken while my phone was resting on a firm base.
I used a 2 sec timer, so that my camera doesn't shakes, while taking photos, otherwise there would have been motion blur. 

Condition 2:
When you are in sunlight and you want to shoot moving object without blur.
If you are in sunlight, always decrease your ISO to minimum.
Shoot at least exposure time as possible. That means lower it upto you photo remains enough bright.
Small exposure time tends to freeze the motion, as your camera sensor will quickly take all the information in few millisecond. So motion blur won't be caused. 

Condition 3:
When you want to capture motion of the object.
For this, first rule first, lower the ISO to its least level possible.
Don't decrease the shutter speed too much otherwise the moving object will freeze. Simply select a value which keep the subject lightened up but also has some motion blur. This way you can show a great motion in your photos.

So these are various conditions in which you can use manual mode in android camera to take great photos. Also keep experimenting through camera and be creative. If you have any other thing you wanna tell, please do write it in comments. 
Please leave a feedback about the blog. What you understood and what you didn't. I would love to help you guys.
Thanks.


 

Complete camera review: Asus Zenfone Selfie

So I'm publishing this blog not because I want to be a blogger or reviewer or anything like that..(maybe in the future i would like that).. it is because I have this phone and would like to write about it.

So I got this phone on 15 May 2016.
I have 32GB model with 3GB RAM.

This blog is about camera performance of the phone and all modes and performance of manual mode.
So without wasting any of your valuable time, let's begin.

 REAR CAMERA:

    The camera is 13MP with f/2.0 and dual toned flash. The camera is pretty awesome. It takes very awesome photos.   However there is some noise is low light conditions. I will show you how to remove noise using manual camera mode int it. Just stay tuned. Here are some sample shots.

What you must notice in these photos are the level of details. Far shots are very good too but close up shots are just amazing. 
Asus has pixelmaster 2.0 technology camera, and it comes with different modes.

These are:

1. Auto Mode
2. Manual
3. HDR
4. Beautification
5. Super Resolution
6. QR Code
7. Low Light
8. Night
9. Depth of field
10. Effect
11. GIF Animation
12. Panaroma
13. Miniature
14. Time Rewind
15. Smart Remove
16. All Smiles
17. Slow Motion
18. Time Lapse
19. Panosphere

Among all these I find manual camera to be most interesting. HDR mode is also good, but the rest are of no use in long term. (Not talking about auto mode.)
I will talk about performance of the manual camera, first let me cover up all other modes.

HDR is pretty decent but everybody who knows how HDR works must already know that you need to eliminate the shake to take a good HDR mode picture.
(To know more about  HDR photography in phone, stay tuned with the blog.)

Beautification Mode is also good. It give you various unique options like chin thinning, eye size increase, blush, skin color, etc.

Super Resolution mode take many photos at a time and combines them to make a big super resolution photograph. The details get incresed in the photo, so is the photo size.

Low light has unique techonolgy of combining multiple pixels to give you photos in extremely low light, but that drops your photos to 3M resolution, so it is prestty useless.

Depth of field give you option to blur the background behind your subject inn photo but it is not what you expect. doesn't do its job well.

Panaroma is already you know.

Miniature is good at the beginning but you fill find it useless most of the time as most of the editing in photo can be done afterwords. 

Time Rewind is useless too, you will never use it. It gives you the option to take multiple burst shot and deciding which photo is good. pretty useless if you know what you are shooting.

Slow motion of this phone is not good. It is like taking multiple photos and combining them to view a slideshow. By the way, slow motion is expected to be good in those phones only which can record 60fps videos or more. this phone records only 30fps which is good for normal videos but not good for slow motion.

Time Lapse is good in everyphone. 

Panosphere was awesome, but it is not able to record details as we would expect. Photos are overlapped at each other. I thought it would give panorama like effect like combining photos at detailed level, but it was not upto the mark. So useless it is too.

Manual Camera Mode:
 So let us come to manual camera mode.
If you want to know how to take good photos in manual mode of your camera, here is my another post on
Using Manual mode in your android camera.
 Here i will talk about the performace of the manual mode.


Now here are some shots taken in auto mode and manual mode.

 See this, The light was coming from other room and there was no light source near this.I took a shot from auto mode, it was a dark room with very low light. So the photo came good but not bright enough. So I increased the exposure time to 2sec in manual mode and ISO50 and took the shot. See the result?

Now here is another photo. It was complete darkness on the street.I took the photo in auto mode and it was dark and dull. SO i opened up manual mode and set exposure to 4sec on ISO50. There you go, another dark object lightened up.

And the camera allows you to take up shots up to 32sec exposure. So you can get pretty decent photos even in the candle light. Just you need are a still hands. I use a self made tripod to take photos of long exposure. It is not a tripod actually, just a stand for my phone, cause shaking camera even a little bit in long exposure shots will surely ruin your photo.

I will post a blog on how to make it, just stay tuned.

One thing more. The lowest ISO on this phone is ISO50, which is pretty good. Most phones only give you option on shooting in minimum ISO100, so its a bonus.

So if you want to take good photos in manual mode, some tips are:
   1. Use ISO50, the minimum. It will give you best details, and  least noise.
   2. Keep practicing on what exposure time you should use to best take your photos. More the light,    less exposure time, lesser the light, more exposure time. But make your you use a firm base for you phone when taking shot with long exposure, cause even a little shake will ruin your photograph.

Video Recording in phone is upto 1080p. It is also very good. Videos can also be shot in manual mode. so you can adjust focus and white balance and ISO too while recording. So it is pretty good.





Oh, I almost forgot to write about the front camera.

FRONT CAMERA

So the front camera is of 13MP f/2.2 with a dual tones flash. Awesome isn't it?

The camera takes  up pretty good photo. Awesome selfies, if you are selfie lover.

The front camera has slightly different options. 

Various options are like rear camera, except:

Selfie panaroma which is just like panaroma but covering short distance for taking selfie of a large group of people.

Manual mode in front camera gives you maximum exposure time of 0.5 second. Nothing to worry as for long exposure shots, back camera is better.

So this was a complete review of the Asus Zenfone Selfie. It has pretty good camera, and if you want a phone with good camera, this is an amazing phone.

If you have any doubt or question or anything you wanna say, just ask in comments. I will love to hear from you people.