Is there any way to make my phone camera not smooth out my skin?

Its important to know what actually makes the phone camera smoothed-out your skin before we know how to not to do it.

The smoothness in the skin is nothing but lack of details in the photograph. These lack of details are caused due to two reasons:

• Small and less powerful camera sensor
• Improper lighting

The phone camera has a small sensor which is not capable of capturing the complete details of your skin and extremities like the pupil structure etc. And hence out of these two reasons, you can't do anything for the first reason, as you can't change the sensor unless and until you change your phone.

The type of lighting matters a lot when subject details in the photo are matter of concern and it's the only thing that you can play with when you are constrained by the phone camera and desire to get details in your photo. When the subject is properly exposed to good quality of lighting, then the phone camera automatically shoots at lower ISO as per its pre-programed algorithms. And when the ISO is low while shooting the photo the details in the photos are bound to be much more than shooting at higher ISO.

Here I have uploaded and image that I had shot, to exemplify what the Details in photo actually mean. This photo was shot in the natural light, on a cloudy day, giving abundant diffused light. Also, this is not shot by a mobile phone, but my Nikon D810 camera while has one of the most powerful sensors in the world. But still my point is, the photo can be studied and the texture of the skin, especially the details in the eyes are so evident due to proper lighting and lower ISO. The second image shows the zoomed version of this photo where the details of the pupil can be seen along with the skin texture.

So if you intend to get the skin texture please keep these points in your mind before clicking.

Photography is an art of Making a photo, so enjoy it while paying minute attention to the details.

Happy clicking!

What is better, to zoom in and then click a photo OR click a photo and then crop it?

It’s always better to do the things right while shooting itself, rather than struggling in post-processing.

To answer your question straight away, it’s always better to Zoom-in while clicking the photos. Advantages of Zooming-in while clicking are better close-ups, ultimate blurring, pleasing Bokeh, sharp image and a final good resolution photo. Which will never be achieved through cropping the photos from a previously clicked image.
 
Technically, let me explain the difference between the two things. Assume that I am using a decent 10 megapixel (MP) camera. When we zoom-in while clicking the photo (I assume its optical zooming, I will explain this in the later part), what we eventually do is, capture the desired (zoomed) image on the sensor, utilizing the full potential of the sensor to see the ‘Zoomed’ vision. We let the light fall on the whole 10MP sensor. Whereas, when we click a photo, and later on crop it, what we eventually do is, we underutilise our sensor capabilities at the cost of image quality. Even though we have a potential 10MP sensor, the moment we crop the photo it’s like using that small portion of a sensor. The cropped images will be of smaller size, and of lower quality than the one which is originally zoomed-in while clicking.
 
Other part of the story, if you possess the full-frame camera body of 24 to 36 MP, the cropped photo will also be of superior quality and pretty good enough to print an enlarged copy of it.
 
Apart from this clarification regarding optical zooming, if you tend to use the Digital-zooming-in, then it’s the same process as of cropping. Digital-zooming is never encouraged if you care for the image quality. Optical zooming is achieved through the specially designed lenses and which offers effectively better quality.
 
Hope this helps in your future decision while cropping a photo.
Happy Clicking...!

How can I capture portrait with mobile?

Why not?

After-all its a camera, and has to perform what you aspire to do with it!!!

This is the most common question asked by many people. Here I have attempted to shed some light on this question.

Before doing a portrait photography session with the mobile camera you need to understand what you need to have more to make the portrait more appealing. This applies to portrait photography in general, whether you use a mobile camera, or a point and shoot camera, or a cropped sensor camera or a full frame camera. Speaking exclusively about the mobile photography the basic thing that we should know is that mobile phones haveSmall image sensor, which implies the image quality will largely depend on the quality of light available for making a photo, and the lens used by the mobile phones is a fixed lens of Wide Angle Lens type.

1. Proper Lighting: This an important aspect of every photo that you make. Illuminating the the subject in an artistic way is the real skill as a photographer. And to know what light makes your photo look very good is an essential instinct to be a successful photographer. For mobile photography you can capture good photos when you have plenty of good quality light on your subject. When I say quality of light, it means the softness of the light plus the intensity. For example you can imagine two scenes: 1. Outdoor Light during rainy and cloudy day, is soft and low intense. 2. Outdoor Light during the sunny day at 12 noon, is harsh creating high contrast images with harsh and unpleasant shadows. So while clicking on your mobile phones, consider to pose your subject (model) besides a window covered with a white curtain. This will act like a flash source (i.e. window) with a diffuser (i.e. curtain) over it, and will give a nice one sided constant light on the face of the model. Try to adjust the distance of the model from the window on the basis of the exposure levels that you get after clicking a picture. This whole thing is in short, adjusting the power of your flash source Manually. You can add some additional lighting by the other mobile torch, but try avoiding the camera flash which will make the image look dull and flat.
2. Type of Lens: The mobile's wide angle lens creates a natural distortion in the image when clicked from very small distance. This is a peculiar thing observed when we use a wide angle lens, the world in front of a wide angle lens gets distorted. The straight lines do not remain straight anymore and start appearing curved. This effect though appears pleasing for landscape photography, may not feel appropriate to portrait photography. Everyone loves the way they look naturally, and the work of the photographer is to enhance that image in the model's mind and not to degrade it. Hence for the mobile photography we have to decrease the distortion. The distortion can be minimised by placing the subject far from the camera. But this might lead to reduction in details in the image. Details are the fine elements and sharpness in the image which highlight the models facial or body features without pixelating. Other thing that can be done if we want to preserve the details and still remove the wide angle distortion is that we can add an additional lens over the mobile camera lens. This will change the wide angle lens into a zoom lens. Most of the world class photographers consider 50mm to 105mm as the best range for portrait photography and especially 85mm being the most favourite amongst them.
3. Avoid Cropping: This is very important in a way to preserve the details on the image. Cropping the image just magnifies the image digitally and does not affect the image aesthetically. So avoid the image cropping unnecessarily, and instead you can step forward or backwards for framing the image properly before clicking the image.
4. Using a Tripod: Image quality improves drastically when a tripod or a gorillapod is used for capturing the images. You can also use a table to rest your camera and use a self timer mode to capture images to eliminate the hand-shake which reflects in the photograph. The photos appear lot sharper when a they are firmly kept on something rather than shot hand-held

I hope these are the basic things which should be kept in mind when we are photographing a portrait by a mobile phone.