smartphone photography tips and tricks

Taking selfies is

Lets start off by saying that this isnt the best way to do this. PCMags resident photography expert, Jim Fisher, recommends a

Some have taken to calling this camera hack a PanoDriveBy. Most modern smartphones come with some sort of stock panorama function that allows you to capture big wide vistas by stitching together various images as you tilt or move your camera (there are also plenty of third-party apps that do the same). While these are designed to be used by one person standing in one place, you can also make them work while in transit

Speaking of the panorama effect, you can also use it to make clones of yourself! From a visual effect point of view. Just have someone do a

And QR codes, too. All the major app stores have plenty of free barcode readers that can handle this function. Here are two really helpful reasons why this is cool: 1) you can scan the barcode on most packages that enter the USPS, UPS, and FedEx ecosystems and automatically transfer that info to your device and 2) you can get more information on just about any product

Your phones camera isnt only able to see more than your eyes, its able to know more than your brain

There are lots of great fitness trackers out there, and many phones are beginning to incorporate trackers directly into the hardware. But say you dont happen to own a tracker and you want to check your pulse rate, what are you supposed to do? Put two fingers on your neck and look at the clock like some Victorian-era bloodletter? Fortunately, you dont have to! The developers behind apps like Instant Heart Rate (available for iOS, Android, and Windows) claim they can read your heart rate through your devices camera. Just place your finger in front of the camera and the app monitors the slight changes in skin color as blood pumps through your finger and then calculates your pulse. If holding your finger against your phones camera seems like too much work, the Cardiio (iOS) app claims it can use your phones camera to read your pulse just by monitoring the minute changes of color in your face!

Its known as a Knucklebutt (or, at least thats what I called it when this idea (which I stole from actor Paul Rudd) briefly became a lite meme five years ago. Mobile technology has finally given humanity the power to bring their butts everywhere

Many cell phone cameras, especially the iPhone, really start to shine when you bring them in close to your subject. The small sensor provides a relatively wide depth of field so you can get entire objects in focus where cameras with bigger sensors and longer lenses would have trouble. When getting close, you can also usually have more control over the lighting of your subject. Are bright patches in the background of your composition throwing off the cameras meter and making your subject dark? Get closer and block it out all together. Small detail shots can be quite effective if done right.

Many smartphone camera offer a digital zoom function, but youre almost always best served by pretending it doesnt exist. Even in the liveview preview, youll be able to see how noticeably your images degrade the second you start to zoom. The camera is simply extrapolating whats already there and basically guessing what the image looks like. It gets ugly fast. When youre cropping, however, youre actually just sampling pixel info that was actually recorded. Many smartphones have 8-megapixels of resolution and sometimes more. That means you can crop substantially and still have plenty of resolution left for display on the web. And the lack of gross upscaling artifacts will help mask the fact that it was taken with a phone.