Quick & Easy Solution to better cell phone pictures!

I found a great thread featured on facebook regarding getting better cell phone pictures of coral posted on Manhattanreefs.com


As we all have found out, most cell phones do not interpret tank lights, specifically blue LEDs properly which gives us crappy pictures. It turns out that with a simple red gel you can cut down the blue while still retaining the rest of the spectrum.





Here are a couple examples I took with an iPhone4s lastnight - nothing was changed or edited except for holding the red gel in front of the camera lens:


Sunburst Nem:




PZ Seduction: (iPhone clip-on macro lens used)




For simple phone pics this simple trick does an incredible job! That was just with one red gel, you can use (layer) more gels depending on your LEDs/amount of blues - for my tank I found a really only needed one. A member on that forum can mail you a set of 4 red gels for very cheap - a small set of 4 gels for phones/ipad is $2.50 ... larger set for DSLR is only $6.00


For more info, please visit Mike's thread here:

http://www.manhattanreefs.com/forum/...one-pic-s.html

 

It's essential a clear piece of thin plastic tinted red. Primarily used in photography and theatre productions. The first picture shows me holding one of the 'gels' -by simply holding this plastic over your phones camera you reduce some, but not all of the blue spectrum which cell phones have a very hard time interpreting. Until learning this trick I had to take all my phone pics under 100% whites and nothing else, which gave somewhat washed out pictures- even 5% blues and the picture would be messed up.

 

If you copy/paste my link it should work - you might have to make a quick account on manhattanreefs but that talks 2secs -mike explains more in detain and he can mail you some of the gels; best $2 I spent!

 

Thanks - they were just simple iPhone pictures but the red gel filter really does wonders to get closer to true-color. They also work/help out with point-and-shoot and DSLR cameras.