Camera phone photography in low light

THE STORY SO FAR. Using my Treo 600 camera phone by the light of a tungsten bulb, I learned to allow its Automatic White Balance time to work its magic. Whereupon the Treo phone over balanced and fell flat on its face.

What about my Nokia 6600 picture phone? Would it do any better than the Treo camera in artificial light?

The Nokia camera phone offered me a choice of two picture modes, Standard or Night. It was, as I have mentioned, a dark and stormy night, so guess which I chose.

Camera phone photo taken with Nokia 6600 on the Night setting

Notice the chiaroscuro, as Leonardo da Vinci would call it. (I prefer to call it that, as it sounds so much better than out of focus.)

On the night setting, the camera shutter stays open for longer to let in more light.

It also lets in more camera shake.

Ignoring the Nokia’s blandishments, I switched to Standard picture mode and dashed off a second shot.

You may find this Nokia picture rather boring in contrast to the pyrotechnics achieved by my Treo 600 camera phone. It isn't even the sharpest shot in town, but at least it's sharper than my Night Time effort.

Here are thumbnails of all four of my Camera Phone White Balance Test Photos.

I’m not distributing any teeshirts for guessing which camera phone gave the most natural looking pictures.

MORAL

Choose the simplest settings first. You might get lucky.

Then again, you might not.

If not, experiment. Electric light is feeble orange stuff and picture phones are all different in how they adapt to it. They have to take the lightest tone in the scene as white, even when they can see very well that it's orange. Like your eyes, your digital camera may need time to adjust.

Posher phones may offer special white balance settings for tungsten (orange), fluorescent (green), daylight (blue) or other varieties of illumination. You may find Auto works just as well without twiddling extra knobs.

In general, get as much light as you can for a picture phone. Flash on a phone, where it exists at all, is anaemic at best. Turn up as many lights as you can find nearby, red, orange, green or sky blue pink. Allow your phone to make of it what it will on the simplest possible setting.

The joy of digital photography is that you see your results at once. You can also delete the duds and take as many shots as you like. No worries of wasting film. If your picture turns out a bit too interesting on the simple setting, add bells and whistles as desired. Exposure compensation. Night time settings. White balance adjustments. See what your cam phone has on offer. When you've run out of choices (usually pretty quickly on a camera phone) ...oh well, you can always try editing later.

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