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  • Taking decent night/lights photos with a phone camera?
  • stevied
    Free Member

    There’s a few sections on my local stuff where I could take some nice night photos of fellow riders lights/light trails.
    Is there a good way to get good photos using camera phone? My only other camera is a DSLR which I don’t want to take out..

    Pyro
    Full Member

    Depends on the phone camera hardware and the camera app.

    If you’ve got a combination that gives you decent manual exposure control, then you might be able to get some good shots. The problem is that the automatic systems on a phone camera tend to ram up the ISO and turn up the flash to keep exposures relatively short, which means you get noisy, badly lit, short exposures. For a clean light trail shot you need low-to-medium ISO, wide aperture and long exposure, and ideally a very steady place to stand a camera. If you can control the first bits on the phone and find the latter, you might be on to a winner.

    stevied
    Free Member

    I’ve got the ‘standard’ HTC camera app but it does have a ‘pro’ mode where you can adjust various settings:

    Any recommendations for settings?

    otsdr
    Free Member

    Increase the exposure time (4th setting) to 0.3 or even 2; this will also require a tripod or some other way of keeping the phone _very_ still.
    It will also be helpful if you enabled the self-timer to allow the phone/tripod assembly to stabilize after pressing the “shutter button”.

    Pyro
    Full Member

    Yeah, Shutter speed to 0.3 or 2, ISO to maybe 400. Judging by that I’m assuming it’s a fixed aperture, so see what happens on a few test shots and tweak from there.

    5thElefant
    Free Member

    Tripod (gorilla mount on handlebars etc) and a long shutter time (several seconds) will give you nice light trails and allow you to use low ISO. Use bright bike lights to spotlight passing bikes to fill them in as they pass.

    stevied
    Free Member

    Thanks guys, will have a play

Viewing 7 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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