Extreme close-up with a cellphone camera

If an object is too small, the cellphone camera won’t focus on it. If you try to get any closer, you’ll be too close for the camera to focus. Thus you get a picture of the background.(Photo: Martin Ove Christensen)

[tweetmeme]By: Martin Ove

Here is a little useful technique, that I found out a while back and wrote about on my old blog. Here’s a “rerun”:

I like to take really close-up pictures of different things, but when you have a small object in front of a distant background, the camera on my Nokia N79 is having a hard time focusing on the object itself. It simple doesn’t fill up the seeker, and the camera is focusing on the background. This is what happened in the picture above.

The effect can’t be helped by putting the camera on “near-photography” of course. You can’t get any closer, ’cause the object is then simply to close for the camera to focus on.

Here is the trick. Simply use the digital zoom. I’m of course aware, that zooming is usually an “emergency only”, since the quality takes a huge impact.

Even though the image quality takes a huge hit when you’re using the digital zoom, it actually pays of. (Photo: Martin Ove Christensen)

But when you’re really close-up and nasty, it doesn’t matter. You can actually make a really, really small object fill the entire seeker-field, making the camera put the focus right smack on. In this case, the body of the spider is about the size of my thumbnail.

Put short, you are able to stand so far from a very small object, that the camera can focus, but still make the object fill the seeker up, so that it becomes the cameras focus priority.

It comes out something like the picture on the right – in all it’s nastyness.

The image is NOT cropped. This was what it actually looked like in the seeker while taking the picture.

The technique doesn’t suddenly make cellphones awesome close-up cameras of course, but it certainly helps a lot.

The main problem is actually holding the phone still, as the photo gets shaking up pretty easy when the camera is fully zoomed in.

Check out even more close-up shots from the same photo-walk by clicking on the picture down below. All pictures are taking with the aforementioned camera phone.

Thank you for reading. Any comments, questions and tips are welcome.