Camera Phone

This is kind of a strange post for what should have been a semi-"serious" photo blog. I will post pictures I took off my phone. The only reason being is that I didn't pick up my real camera as often as I promised everyone this semester, and that I don't have much to show for myself except for these camera phone pictures. Sad, isn't it?



But I'll try to make this post productive by describing the limitations of the camera on my Samsung Impression, accompanied by relevant pictures. The images hereafter, I should let you know, have made the usual run through Lightroom 2.

The camera's exposure meter has 3 settings: Matrix, Center-Weighted, and Spot. From my experience, none of these settings behave the way they should. Center-weighted and Spot accurately meter only about 3/4 of the time, leaving me with many pictures that are either way underexposed or blown out. Matrix mode does the best job of reading exposure, but usually pictures with high contrast lighting come out a stop too bright. This snap was one of my preliminary experiments on how the camera would handle such a lighting situation:


Contrast isn't the best on the Samsung Impression, which is not unlike most other camera phones I've seen. But, in good lighting, or outdoors, the camera can put out some decent looking pictures with a fair bit of tonal depth. Keep in mind, again, that I ran this image through Lightroom (increased blacks), but this picture was a good example of nice contrast before I messed with it.


I think the best thing about this camera is the lens' surprising sharpness. In good light, the lens can swallow quite a bit of fine detail. Unfortunately, this sharpness means little in dim light or high contrast scenes, when the camera's shoddy metering usually under or over-exposes the scene. Nevertheless, bravo sharp lens:


Also, there's a fun panorama mode that I enjoy playing with when I'm bored:


The colors produced are vibrant and I'm relatively happy with them. However the camera introduces fairly random color casts on every picture, and there is no consistency between images. A scene taken outdoors in the sunlight will look magenta in one snap, and yellow in the next. There are no settings to change for white balance.



Overall, the camera kind of sucks. The metering is almost always wrong, contrast is normally flat, and scenes take on psychedelic colors at times. Also, the biggest drawback to this camera is the enormous amount of delay between when I press the shutter release, to when the camera takes the picture. It's a matter of about a 1/3 to 1/2 second delay! Forget sports photography with this phone. Usually what happens is I try to take a picture of someone doing something hilarious but end up getting the last hazy part of the moment.


However, I am glad to have a camera phone again, after having to use a backup phone for the first half of the year. I know it looks like I'm letting my photo hobby die off a little, but I still very much enjoy taking pictures for myself, albeit with a phone. This semester got a little crazier than I expected and my level of photography-laziness never dropped, thus I remained in my photo-hiatus for the semester. But I hope you will agree with me that these pictures and this post are the beginning of a new fervor and I do sincerely promise to keep posting and taking pictures. Thanks for reading.