Pictures taken with a camera phone are usually of average quality, but there are a few tips to help with the quality of the image. The Digital Photography School has an article in which they give 13 tips for improving camera phone photos.

Among those tips, my four favorites are:

  • Well lit subjects – Camera phones benefit greatly from this since they usually don’t have a flash. As the image gets darker, a lot of digital noise appear on the picture because the image sensors on a cell phone are very tiny and not as effective as those on a real digital camera.
  • Get close – The preview on the screen of a camera phone can sometimes be misleading. The image looks quite different when opened on your computer, so make sure you frame your subject well or else it will appear too tiny on the final picture.
  • Avoid using the digital zoom – This goes for all digital cameras, but especially camera phones. A digital zoom will reduce the quality of the image by a lot and you will have better results if you use a photo editing software on your computer to enlarge a picture. Make sure you take the picture at the highest resolution possible if you are considering editing it.
  • Keep your lens clean – This is probably the most important tip. My cell phone lens is always dirty with fingerprints and half of the time I forget to clean it off before taking a picture resulting in a blurry image. It looks quite good on the preview screen, but as soon as I take the picture to my computer I can see that it’s not very sharp. Make sure you clean your lens for a good photo!

Camera phone photography is an art by itself. Feel free to share your own tips here!