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Android Camera App Walkthrough // Mobile Photography for Beginners Pt. 1
In this first episode of my series on mobile photography for beginners, I will do a complete walkthrough of the Android Camera app on my Google Pixel 4a. You will learn every important button and setting to start taking amazing photos with your phone!
👉 OTHER EPISODES https://loicba.me/mobile-photography
🔗 Astrophotography with a phone https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
🔗 Astro-Timelapses with a phone https://youtu.be/Ot3SxyfwrJc
🔗 How does Portrait Mode actually work? https://youtu.be/NKTL3aElKwg
#mobilephotography #camerawalkthrough #android
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:18 - Access the camera quickly
00:28 - Switch between the cameras
00:45 - How to use the zoom?
00:55 - Focus & Exposure
01:52 - Camera Menu
03:00 - Portrait Mode
03:40 - Night Sight & Astrophotography
04:15 - Video Mode
04:46 - Panorama & Photo Sphere Modes
04:57 - Advanced Settings
06:44 - Conclusion
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- Welcome to my first episode, in my series on mobile photography for beginners. In this episode, we're gonna do a complete walkthrough of my Google Pixel 4a camera app, but I'm gonna keep it simple so it can apply to any other Android phone. Let's roll the intro. (loud clack) (birds chirping) (waves crashing) I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, and let's get started right away. The quickest way to access the camera app on any Android phone is to double-click your power button. This is gonna open your main camera right away. The first option we're gonna look at is how to switch between cameras. So usually on the bottom left, there's an option to toggle between the selfie camera and the rear facing camera. I suggest using the rear camera as much as possible because that's where you're gonna get the best image quality out of the cameras of your phone. Then we're gonna look at zoom and I suggest not zooming too much inside of the camera because you're losing quality when you zoom using a digital zoom on your camera. The next thing we're gonna look at is how to focus using your camera. And if you see there's a little circle in the center of the screen, but if you wanna focus somewhere else, you can actually click on it and it's gonna focus the camera on there. If you don't know what focus means, it basically means that that part of the image is gonna be perfectly sharp. The little circle also has another use, it's to make sure that that part of the image is visible. So for example, if you come here on the mountains because the sky is pretty bright, it's gonna automatically make everything else darker. But if we wanna have the mountains that are bright, we can click on that part and tell it that we want that part to be visible inside of the image. When clicking on that little circle, there's another thing that is gonna appear and it's usually on the right. You're gonna have some sliders. So most Android phones only have one slider, but on the Pixel phone, we actually have two. And these allow to make some parts of the image brighter and darker as we wish. So usually you don't need to touch these at all because the camera already does a lot of calculation to make sure that its settings are right, but if you wanna have a little bit more control, you can definitely play with them. Now let's look at the menu options. So if you come inside of here, I usually have my flash off because in my opinion, it makes the image even worse. The only exception is if you have low light conditions and take pictures of things that are moving a lot, so let's say children or pets or things like that. So that can be useful. I also usually have RAW pictures off, but we're gonna talk about the difference between RAW and JPEG pictures in another episode. So definitely subscribe if wanna learn more about that. I also usually have motion photos off. Motion photos are basically a three-second video clip that's taken at the same time as you're taking the image. And again, I think this is a great if you have children or pets or anything like that, we it will have a little bit more of a memory, but for landscape photos and things like that, it's definitely not very useful because it takes a lot of space in the end to store all of these files. Then we have our timer option right here and here I usually leave it off. But it's good to know that you have a timer, if you wanna have a three-second or ten-second timer. Finally, we have the ratio and this is basically the format of your image. And for this, I always suggest leaving it to the default format because if you use another option and it starts cropping in, it's actually gonna reduce the quality of your output image. And you're better to crop it afterwards, if you wanna have a different crop when posting or sharing the image. Now let's move on to portrait mode. What is very important to understand inside of portrait mode is that you should always tap to tell what should be in focus inside of your image, because it's gonna have a really hard time determining what should be in focus or not, if you don't do that, especially if you don't have a face inside of it. Another thing we need to talk about is that the background is fake blur, so it creates blur, but it's not real blur from the lens, it's blur using AI. So that's why sometimes on the edge, it has a hard time and creates some weird results. Another thing we wanna look at is that inside of our main menu here there's a face retouching option. By default it's off. And I always leave it off also because I think it's better to retouch it afterwards. And I just not a big fan of retouching faces in general. The next mode we're gonna look at is night sight, right here. And for this one, it's gonna allow us to take some great pictures in low light condition, but for this need to be very steady. So it's really good that you take two hands and hold your arms against your body to keep the camera as steady as possible when taking the shot. If your camera is on a tripod and it's dark enough an astrophotography mode is gonna enable automatically, and it's gonna allow it to get some really good pictures of the stars. If you don't have a Google Pixel phone, there's other ways of taking stars. I'm gonna get a link, a video in the corner right here, so you can go watch that one out. The next one we're gonna look at is video. And for this, it works in pretty much a similar way as any of the other modes. And you also have a slow motion mode and a time-lapse mode that allows you to slow down the video or make it go faster. If you look at my settings right here, I always leave them at 10 ADP, 40 frames per second, because if I was filming at 4K, it would use a lot more of my storage. And when looking back at the videos on my phone or even my computer, I cannot really see a huge difference between the two. So it's just not worth having everything in 4K in the end when capturing memories. There's also two other modes inside of here, panorama and photo sphere. But I don't really use either of them because the image quality just isn't as good because they don't have computational photography like the other modes. Now let's take a closer look at some more advanced settings. To access your camera settings, you wanna go on your settings here and then click on the gear icon. And I'm not gonna talk about the few first options because they're pretty obvious. We're gonna jump into device storage right away. And I have this off because I don't want the camera to turn off the high quality images, even if I don't have much space left on my camera. But if you need to take some few more images and you don't have the space, you could turn this one on. I think the most interesting options are inside of the advanced option right here. So we're gonna leave on show dirty lens warning. And if you didn't see the option for RAW and JPEG inside of your camera app, this is where you can enable it. I have store videos efficiently off because it causes problems with my NAS, which stands for network attached storage. But most of the time, just leave it on. It's gonna create better quality videos and also smaller files. I have social media deaf features off, I don't really understand what it does to be honest. So I just leave it off and it's not a problem at all. Then I have enabled time-lapse for astrophotography on because I definitely want to have the small time-lapses when taking astrophotography shots. Then if we come back in our options here, we're gonna have framing hits. And this is very useful. So it's gonna tell you if you're straight or not, and if you have your camera down or something like that, tell you how to get a better shot. And then I wanna have the grid type on, and I'm gonna have it at three by three. And this is very important for me to afford a rule of thirds that I'm gonna talk a lot about inside of these videos. So definitely turn on your grid with a three by three grid. Then if you look at a camera resolution, I wanna have it on full resolution because you want to have the highest quality images to be able to edit it afterwards. So if you have something that is not full resolution, you're gonna already be losing some data when you're gonna start editing the image. So this is not great to start with. Finally, if we look at the bottom here, I wanna leave video stabilization on to get some better videos in the end. I just saw that I'm way over my five minute objective. So let's wrap up this video. I hope you enjoyed this little walk-through of my Google camera app on my phone. And if you did, please let me know by hitting the like button below. Definitely subscribe to the channel for more videos on mobile photography for beginners. See you in the next one. Bye-bye. (upbeat music)
Video Links
- 👉 OTHER EPISODES
- 🔗 Astrophotography with a phone
- 🔗 Astro-Timelapses with a phone
- 🔗 How does Portrait Mode actually work?
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
In this first episode of my mobile photography for beginners series, I'm doing a complete walkthrough of the Google Pixel 4a camera app. The goal is to keep it simple so the principles apply to almost any Android phone, but I'll highlight the powerful computational photography features that make Pixel stand out.
We'll start with the essentials: how to access the camera quickly by double-clicking your power button, how to switch between front and rear cameras, and why I recommend using the rear camera as much as possible for image quality. Then I'll dive into the focus and exposure system. That little circle in the center of your screen isn't just for focusing—it's also your exposure meter. Tap it to shift focus to a specific part of the frame, and you'll see sliders appear that let you brighten or darken different areas of the image.
In the menu, I'll walk through each setting: flash (which I keep off most of the time), RAW versus JPEG capture, motion photos, the timer, and aspect ratio. For portrait mode, the big takeaway is that the blur is AI-generated, not optical, so you need to tap to set focus carefully—the camera sometimes struggles at the edges. Night Sight is where things get really interesting. Hold steady, and in truly dark conditions, the phone will automatically switch to astrophotography mode to capture stars.
I'll also cover video modes (slow motion and time-lapse), panorama and photo sphere (which I don't use because the image quality isn't as strong), and then the advanced settings that actually matter: enabling RAW if you want to shoot it, turning on the grid for rule of thirds composition, shooting at full resolution, and leaving video stabilization enabled.
The whole point of this series is to demystify these tools so you can take intentional, better photos with what's already in your pocket.