You are probably aware that modern smartphones come with a plethora of capabilities and can serve a multitude of purposes. They aren’t just phones that you can use to call other people and send texts and they haven’t been for a while. Phones nowadays are multipurpose tools and they are a lot more effective than PCs and laptops as they are portable and can fit in any pocket.
And, if you’re using your smartphone for entertainment purposes, the options are practically endless as well. For instance, you could play online bingo games, or other types of games that are available and can be downloaded via the Google Play or the App Store.
We’ve done many articles on how to boost and upgrade your phone and make it suitable for a variety of uses. There are so many jobs that you can effectively do using just a mobile phone, or at least have your phone as a main tool for the job.
Plenty of opportunities
So many usual and unusual events in the past several years have been recorded thanks to the fact that our smartphones now feature video cameras that can capture everything with a pretty decent level of quality. Still, even though recordings with your phone camera are good for personal and even semi-professional use, the camera on your smartphone isn’t a professional camera. However, you can turn it into one with few simple tools, gadgets, at a reasonably low cost.
Let’s have a look at some of the potential ways to turn your smartphone into a professional camera. That smartphones nowadays come with high-capability cameras. There are already films that have been recorded with smartphone cameras, including even some award-winning titles.
Lens attachment
The first option that can significantly boost the quality of the images that you take with your smartphone camera. There are options that come with three or four separate lenses that can be attached to your smartphone and allow you to capture more realistic photos and zoom in without diminishing the photo quality. Some pretty neat lens attachments come at a £20 price or even lower.
Tripod for a Smartphone
If you’re going to invest in a lens attachment, it would definitely be wise to consider a further investment into a specialised tripod for your smartphone. There are different types of tripods for smartphones, smaller ones, larger ones, monopods and many of these come with attachments that’ll enable you to connect your smartphone to other tripods. With a tripod you can record much better time-lapses or panorama videos, especially if you get one that can rotate.
Skate dolly
If a tripod enables you to take better photos and videos when your smartphone is static, a skate dolly will give you a much better chance of capturing videos with a moving phone. Smartphones are small enough which will enable your skate dolly to reach limited and secluded locations.
Here’s one suggestion. You can create backgrounds from cardboard and/or Styrofoam and then film them with your smartphone after you place it on a skate dolly. You can create scenic landscapes on the cheap and your video can look rather remarkable.
Drone
While the skate dolly can help you experiment with various background and capture images and videos from a low angle, a drone will give you an opportunity to film videos from greater heights. The use of drones can be a tad problematic, depending on the context and the exact circumstances, so make sure you have a legal right to film a location from a drone before you start doing it.
Software
It depends what you need to use your camera for, but generally speaking, there are plenty of options. If you choose all the upgrades that we mentioned above, you will have a really large scope of activities and potential videos that you can film. Here are some rather remarkable movies that have been shot on an iPhone.
Finally, there’s one rather simple option. There are plenty of software apps, pretty cheap or even free, that can boost your smartphone camera, without adding an actual accessory or an attachment to it.