Today I set myself a special photography challenge: What kind of pictures can I take using the camera in my new mobile phone? No editing allowed except what is possible with Photoshop Express on the mobile phone itself. The mobile is an HTC Wildfire S, an entry-level Android handset, which has a 5MP camera. The light conditions were pretty typical for Brisbane in spring: Bright sunshine with broken clouds.

First up, the obligatory shot of Story Bridge from the ferry. Learning points number one and two presented themselves immediately: It is really quite hard to see the soft-shutter button on the screen in direct sunlight, and it is extremely easy for part of your finger to cover the lens while trying to keep a secure grip on such a tiny device. It took me a couple of goes to sort that out, resulting in this pretty decent picture. I was especially impressed by the details in the sky.

Trying to get the yellow and purple blossoms properly exposed did however result in a blown-out sky:

Things I like a lot: The tap-to-focus feature. This helped enormously in controlling exposure. In high-contrast situations (such as a partially-shaded park in the subtropics at midday), I could get adequate exposure by tapping where I wanted the focus to be. This can be clearly seen in the following two pictures: Choose a white flower as the focus and the picture overall gets darker with highlights properly exposed but shadow detail lost, choose a dark-red one and the picture overall gets brighter with shadow detail available but highlights blown out.

However, absolutely nothing could compensate for trying to photograph a yellow flower in direct sunlight. The result were totally washed out highlights, as expected. Compare this with the right-hand shot of a similarly-coloured flower taken in the shade.

Things I don’t like: The on-screen button for the shutter, especially in conjunction with the delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken. On occasion that led to camera shake, purely because I thought it had taken the picture when in fact it hadn’t. I tried capturing a moving subject (a lizard moving into the undergrowth) but no way!

I’ve read some reviews of this phone camera that in parts verged on the vitriolic, which seems a tad unfair to me. It isn’t a DSLR, nor even a dedicated pocket camera and shouldn’t be expected to behave like one. It’s a small camera added to a mobile phone. Overall it behaved exactly as I had expected: Reasonable pictures with really quite decent colour and detail when the lighting was right, a really nice feature in tap-to-focus, and perfectly good enough quality for snapshots for when one doesn’t want to carry around a DSLR.

Will I leave my DSLR at home in the future? No, of course not. If I go out with the intention of doing photography I’ll take the DSLR (and in all likelihood also the tripod, the filter, the cable release, the two spare lenses etc). But if I happen to come across a photographic opportunity unexpectedly, or if I want to capture and immediately share something, I’ll gladly use the camera phone.

I leave you with a not-entirely-sharp picture of a lizard, sun-bathing. They do that.