write.as/jonbeckett

I took a photo for the “Freyeday” meme on Tumblr this afternoon, and it got an instant reaction from a few friends. I knew it was going to get an instant reaction, because I've kind of figured out how to hack even the cheapest mobile phone cameras to get half-decent results from them.

Here's the thingmobile phone cameras are rubbish at low light. So you need good light. I achieved the above photo by standing next to a window, staring straight at the strip light above my head (so in reality, the entire photo is rotated back through 90 degrees). This ended up with a fairly sharp photo, because mobile phone cameras are tiny, so they only really get things close to them in focus. I had four goes at the photothis was the only sharp one. I'm guessing for the rest of them the camera was just a bit too close to focus on my eye.

Pro tipif you hold the camera next to your eye, and look sideways at it, you can see your pupil in the glass of the lens if it's pointing the right direction. Alsouse the camera on the back of the phoneit's much higher res than the back-facing camera.

So you end up with a sharp, well lit photo. You want to make it look arty next.

The above photo went through the Pro filter on Instagram, then I downloaded it from the instagram site, and put it through Photoscape (very good open source photo editing app). I chose the “Movie” filter, and then cranked up the saturation curve.

The entire process took about one minute, from start to finish. The main reason I could do it so quickly is because I've done it before.

I'll never be allowed in the magic circle.