How to take better photos with your Android phone

Take your Android photography to the next level with these tips and tricks for capturing masterpieces with your smartphone.

Many Android phones come with a high-quality camera designed to capture your subject’s tiniest details and features, and while they’re not technically on the same level as a DSLR camera, you can still take the perfect picture with just your phone if you know how to use it. Even if you’re a beginner, you can quickly learn how to capture amazing photos with your Android phone (and if you actually are a beginner, be sure to check out our top 10 Android photography tips for beginners!)

Here are some helpful tricks to help you take better photos with your Android device!

• Play around and explore your camera settings
• Make sure your lens is clean
• Forget the flash: use external lighting
• Crop, don’t zoom
• Find your favorite photography app
• Burst first, ask questions later
• Follow your favorite photographers on social media

Explore your camera settings

Get acquainted with your phone and all the camera settings before you start shooting, and you’ll feel a lot more comfortable capturing your shots!

While shooting from your phone’s stock camera is great for 99.9% of pictures — especially if you’ve got a recent Samsung, LG or HTC phone — playing around with the various modes and settings can really allow you to experiment and get creative.

Make sure your lens is clean

While this may seem like an obvious one, cleaning your phone lens can be a lot harder to remember than cleaning your DSLR lens. After all, there’s no lens cap protecting your Android phone’s camera from dirt and scratches like professional cameras have.

Carrying around a small lens cleaning cloth, or even having small micro fiber lens cleaning patches stitched to the inside of your purse or your jacket are simple ways to remind you to clean your phone lens and screen, so you’re always ready to take the clearest shots with your phone.

Or just use your shirt.

Don’t forget to clean your front lens, too! We break down how important cleaning your lenses can be in our top 8 tips to make you an Android photography expert.

Forget the flash: use external lighting

Don’t bother with the flash

When it’s dark outside, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to turn on the flash to light up your photos, but it’s not always the best for picture quality. In fact, we’ll go one further: Don’t bother using your flash. Nearly ever.

Always try to find a natural light source when you’re shooting your photos. If you’re at a restaurant and want to snap a picture of your meal, try to get a seat by a window, so you can capture all the meal’s details with the perfect lighting. If you’re looking to take a selfie, try posing in front of a big window. This won’t only make your face and features light up – even on a cloudy day – but it will darken the background and make you the center of attention.

If it’s absolutely impossible to capture your picture without natural lighting (and sometimes that’s the case), try your best to find another external light source, like a lamp or even a candle. While it may seem silly, almost any other lighting will look better than the flash, especially since you then have more control of what you choose to light and highlight in your photographs.

Crop, don’t zoom

Just like your Android phone’s flash, zoom is another readily available option for phoneographers that should be avoided like the photographic plague.

Zoom can lower the quality of your pictures, and you might actually be cutting out something you didn’t notice in the photo that you may find amazing when you glance at the picture during editing.

It’s hard to remember when you’re shooting, but your Android device is not the same as a DSLR camera: you can’t just zoom in on something and have the quality stay virtually the same. A lot of professional photographers avoid the zoom altogether and prefer to crop strategically in the editing process afterwards, so they don’t miss out on anything they captured in the picture.

If you really need to get in close with your subject, pick yourself up and physically move closer to it rather than using your zoom. This is the best way to get creative control over your photo subject without using zoom to mess up the picture’s overall quality.

Burst first, ask questions later

Bursting may seem like a lazy way to take pictures, but it’s probably the most efficient way to capture your perfect shot!

Whether it be selfies, landscapes, or a masterpiece of a meal, using burst is a great way to take a bunch of photos without stress: just hold down the shutter button and your phone will take rapid-fire shots that you can browse through later to find the perfect one.

While a bunch of the pictures you take with burst will be terrible and totally unusable, there are bound to be a few gems hiding in there. Take the time to go through your burst shots and pick out the best ones, and always remember to delete the bad burst photos so they don’t take up space on your phone.

Find a favorite photography editing app

Snapseed is a popular editor.

After you’re done shooting, you’re going to want to up your photo game by editing your pictures with your favorite editing app.

There are plenty of photo editing apps to choose from out there, and all of them do their own unique things like overlay certain filters, allow you to edit brightness and contrast, and even add text or stickers to your photos.

Photo editing apps are also a great tool to have if you’re not confident with the photos you’ve taken. You can even salvage some photographs through a little bit of editing and tweaking if you’re worried about quality.

Follow your favorite photographers on social media

Sometimes taking the best pictures with your Android phone doesn’t start with your camera app; it starts with a quick visit to social media to get motivated from Android phone photographers who are already taking beautiful pictures!

Following some of your favorite photographers on social media is an amazing way to get ideas, see what kind of art other people are creating, and get motivated to go out and start shooting. Some may even respond in the comments if you ask them how they shot a certain subject in a certain style or how they managed to edit a specific photograph to look a certain way.

Creep around the discover page on Instagram and see what other Android phone photographers have shot. Start by mimicking a style you’re fond of, and it will eventually evolve into your own.

Some photographers on social media even share their own tips and tricks for shooting, so be sure to check out a bunch of different profiles for inspiration.

Your turn

Are there any tips and tricks for shooting amazing photos with your Android phone that we may have missed? Let us know in the comments below.

To stay competitive, Walmart and Target turn to startups for help

Ten startup teams are holed up in Minneapolis through next month to use a new retail-focused accelerator there to launch everything from voice-based search technology for retailers to interactive games that help kids learn STEM concepts. Their workspace is a typical startup bullpen — an open zone filled with things like boxes of food, Apple products, whiteboards with rows of Post-its and signs hanging from the ceiling that mark each startup’s turf.

Their host is none other than Target, which built an 8,000-square-foot space at its headquarters in the city for the inaugural accelerator it launched earlier this summer. Never mind that Target employs some 341,000 people and does more than $73 billion in sales a year — it also wants to try and bottle some innovation from scrappy startup entrepreneurs as it attempts to chart a path forward.

That’s as good a starting point as any in understanding a high-stakes shift in priorities underway at big legacy retailers like Target and Walmart. Indeed, they’re increasingly caught up in a Silicon Valley-style scramble for top talent like coders and engineers. They’re also launching and staffing up skunkworks labs and working with startups — all in an effort to slingshot themselves into the future.

Some of the ideas Target is pursuing include the accelerator it founded in partnership with Techstars, as well as its “Food + Future coLab” focused on food innovation.That effort was launched in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and Ideo. The idea behind the lab is to bring together teams from each of those founding organizations to come up with big ideas related to food.

Target in recent weeks began testing a concept at one of its Boston stores that came out of the lab. Essentially, it allows people to scan fruits and vegetables to identify their nutritional value — and to pay for the item based on its freshness.

Walmart, in its own way, is racing toward the same goal.

Earlier this month, the retail giant said it would pay about $3 billion to buy e-commerce startup (and Amazon competitor) Jet.com. In recent weeks, the company also rolled out its Walmart Pay payment system to all of its US stores.

And while it’s not readily apparent from visiting any of its nearly 5,300 US locations, Walmart also has a San Francisco Bay Area outpost called WalmartLabs — a kind of skunkworks unit focused on the retailer’s digital products and services like Walmart Pay.

“We’ve got several new things in the works I can’t announce,” Walmart Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King told Engadget. “But let’s just say you’ll see us make it even more compelling to use your phone in the store.”

What it all amounts to is two of the biggest, most traditional retailers in the US looking West for inspiration. And their experimentation is certainly worth watching. It might fall flat, but there’s also a chance they could successfully infuse enough Silicon Valley-style innovation into their playbooks to reinvent themselves — and the retail experience — in the process.

In a way, they don’t have much choice. While the retail industry is eking out barely 1 percent growth, e-commerce is zipping along at 15 percent, according to the latest Deloitte Retail Volatility Index, published by the consulting firm Deloitte.

Target, which said earlier this year that it plans to spend more than $2 billion starting in 2017 on tech and supply-chain improvements, has been busy on several fronts to try and capture some fresh digital mojo.

The company is hiring staffers for a tech project codenamed “Goldfish” that will be housed out of Target’s Sunnyvale, California, office, which opened in 2014 to focus on things like online and mobile data analytics. A job posting for engineers is short on details but says, “We’re a brand new team, intent on changing the way people shop.” West Stringfellow, whom Target hired last year as its first entrepreneur-in-residence after stints at Amazon and PayPal, is behind the mystery project, though he’s staying put in Minneapolis.

Among the teams participating in Target’s accelerator is L.A.-based MakersKit, which provides DIY craft kits and instructional videos for all ages. Others include MakerBloks, a Montreal-based startup that creates interactive games and craft materials to help children learn about electronics, technology and STEM ideas; and ItsByU, a startup that provides kits for users to create their own wedding-flower arrangements.

The teams are going through 14 weeks of programming and mentorship from executives like Target’s chairman and CEO himself, Brian Cornell. According to the company, 50 percent of the startup teams have female cofounders, and two are international — one from Canada and one from Hong Kong. There are also a couple of family-run outfits, with a husband-and-wife team as well as a team of sisters.

“We’re looking first and foremost to help these startups,” said Stringfellow, who is now Target’s vice president of internal innovation and operations. “If there’s a symbiotic opportunity, great. If not, that’s OK, too. We’ll be learning from their discipline, focus, excitement and passion, and a second-order effect will be us taking some of that and applying it to our products and teams and practices.”

The approach to digital and innovation efforts at WalmartLabs is a little different.

The company’s division focusing on new technologies and digital products is keeping its roadmap mostly hidden. But it generally focuses on innovation that can be built into features across Walmart’s operation.

WalmartLabs’ Bay Area presence is split between Sunnyvale and San Bruno, where it shares a parking lot with Twitter. King says being there lets the division compete with big tech companies for engineering and coding talent. And according to King, at least, it wins that hiring race more often than not.

At the inaugural TAP Conference last year, WalmartLabs director of innovation Ojonimi Bako spelled out its basic M.O. — the unit has a degree of freedom to experiment, separate from the rest of the company. The best of these ideas could eventually be scaled across the company. The lab is also free to pursue its own acquisitions of other companies, of which there have been 15, King says.

Together, Walmart and Target’s respective approaches show how legacy retailers can compete in the digital age. And they’re not alone. Over in Europe, retailer John Lewis — which operates 46 shops across the UK as well as a web presence — has an accelerator program of its own, called the JLAB.

The five retail tech startups John Lewis selected for the latest round of the program are built around everything from programmable robots to advanced computer-visioning. They get access to mentors and capital. John Lewis, in turn, gets to learn from them in a way that could potentially help the 152-year-old retailer stay relevant in the 21st century.

There are plenty of other examples. Consumer-goods giant Unilever has a corporate accelerator called the Unilever Foundry. Disney and BMW also host their own startup incubators.

Efforts like these from the retailers might end up successfully connecting them with smaller, faster-moving companies. And those companies might have different skill sets and insights the bigger brands can tap to improve their own operations.

Or maybe not.

Walmart CTO King, for his part, says traditional retailers too often are content to just build what he calls “toy shops,” where “10 to 20 people form a group to maybe build an app or play with beacons.”

Indeed, after a few years of operation, upscale department store Nordstrom recently dismantled the tech-focused “innovation lab” it had set up six years before. Nordstrom spokesman Dan Evans told Engadget innovation is now required across the whole company, not just for one unit.

“We no longer have a specific innovation lab, as we folded the responsibility of innovation across our technology teams so that each group has a stake in how we innovate for the customer,” he said.

It’s an admission of how tough it is to get the balance right: to maintain the core of what you as a retailer do, while at the same time trying to figure out why the world is changing around you, and what you can do about it.

Kasey Lobaugh, chief retail innovation officer for Deloitte Consulting, says he’s seeing a growing number of retailers deciding to pursue one or both of these paths, launching so-called innovation labs, many of them in Silicon Valley, and setting up incubators or accelerators.

Those innovation labs, though, have “been of marginal success so far,” Lobaugh says. “Largely what those centers have done is focus on technologies to apply to the current business. Like, not changing the business model, just doing something like adding beacons so we can communicate with an app and maybe send the customer interesting marketing material while they’re shopping.

“The second thing retailers have started to do,” he continued, “is say, ‘Maybe we need to be more like a startup, maybe figure out ways to be around startups.’ And so they launch an incubator to figure out what they’re doing and maybe learn from them. I’d say the jury is still out on how successful that will be.”

To Walmart’s King’s point about “toy shops,” Lobaugh notes how Uber did a lot more “than just develop a mobile app and tack it onto a taxicab company.” And therein is the cautionary note for retailers who think innovation centers are some sort of magic bullet.

“The analogy I would use for what retailers are doing with their innovation centers — and this is painting with a broad brush — but they’re thinking about, ‘How can I tack a mobile app onto my taxicab company?” he said. “Instead of thinking about, ‘How can I use technology to recast my business to be able to compete in a very different environment?’”

Meanwhile, at Target, Walmart and many of their competitors, that’s exactly the work that’s happening now. Expect it to continue. The retailers are more open now to looking for new ideas in unexpected places. Even if that place is a small, tech-savvy startup that couldn’t be more removed from the world of big-box retail.

Images: Target (Innovation lab teams); Walmart (@WalmartLabs); Mike Blake / Reuters (storefront)

Unique ‘Celebration’ Apple-1 Sells for $815,000

A rare “Celebration” Apple-1 computer has fetched $815,000 in an auction hosted by charity auction site CharityBuzz, one of the highest prices an Apple-1 has sold for at auction. During the final minutes of the auction, bids reached $1.2 million, but it appears the last bid was pulled just seconds before the auction ended.

The “Celebration” Apple-1, so named by computer historian Corey Cohen, features a blank “green” PCB board that was never sold to the public and was not a part of a known production run.

The auction included an original Apple-1 ACI cassette board, pre-NTI, with Robinson Nugent sockets, a period correct power supply, an early Apple-1 BASIC cassette labeled and authenticated by original Apple employee Daniel Kottke, Apple-1 manuals, marketing materials, and Cassette Board schematics.

Unlike other Apple-1 computers that have fetched lower prices, the Celebration Apple-1 is not in working condition but could be restored to full functionality with minor tweaks. Cohen recommended against such restoration to preserve the board’s uniqueness. “The Apple-1 board is a not just a piece of history, but a piece of art,” he said.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak originally created and sold 175 Apple-1 computers during the summer of 1976, marking the launch of Apple computer, a company that’s grown to be one of the largest and most influential in the world. Of those 175 machines, only 60 or so are still in existence, making them quite valuable to collectors.

Several Apple-1 computers have surfaced at auction over the past few years, selling for prices between and $365,000 and $905,000.

10 percent of the proceeds from the CharityBuzz auction will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Tags: Apple-1, CharityBuzz
Discuss this article in our forums