How to: Make more from your smartphone snaps

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In a tutorial for beginners, and with plenty of real world examples, I look at some practical photo-taking tips for your multi-megapixel smartphone when conditions are less than perfect... and I explain that adjusting the photo later in software is cheating - but often helps a lot!

"With 5 megapixel cameras with professional optics now built into quite a few smartphones, I daresay that that the majority of people reading this use their smartphone as their main camera. Certainly for day to day photos anyway - maybe you keep a top of the range standalone for weddings and funerals?

Having your smartphone always with you is great in that you can, quite literally, snap anything that takes your fancy, at a moment's notice, without having to remember to take your standalone camera everwhere. Which is great, because it means that a lot of photos now get taken which would otherwise have been missed.

However, the chances are that, partly because of the spontaneous nature of smartphone photography, the lighting conditions are unlikely to be ideal. Usually, you'll only have a few seconds to get ready to shoot and it's all you can do to swing yourself so that the sun is roughly behind you or perhaps fiddle with a single setting in the Camera application."

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