How to take photos at night with your smartphone Android

Smartphones allow us to take photos and capture all of our memories, and handily keep them stored in our pockets or share them to all of our social outlets. In fact, the amazing advancements we’ve had with our Android phones have made it very unnecessary to purchase big fancy cameras unless we plan on pursuing a career as a photographer.

The downside though is that it is very, very difficult to take high-quality photos during the night. This is down to a couple of things, but one of the main reasons is that the light sensors on our Android devices are very small in comparison to those big fancy cameras.

These sensors are very light-sensitive, which is why during the day you can take incredibly detailed, high-def photos without any real issues. During the night however they struggle to take in any of the surroundings and as a result you end up with blurry imagery.

There are a couple of solutions which can help improve the issue and enable you to take decent night photos, however even they can’t help you produce crystal clear imagery at night.

Sensor Manipulation

One thing you can do is play around with the light sensitivity of the sensor. You may or may not have already done this to some extent in the past however more often than not, your device will do this automatically providing you have it on “Automatic” or “Night Mode”. The trouble with increasing the values for light sensitivity is that you’ll also get greater errors that appear, along with washed out colors and more blurriness. Not what we want for a good night photo.

Lighting

Light is obviously a big problem when it comes to taking night photos. Low lighting makes it very hard, and as it’s a night photo you are after, chances are light isn’t something you have a lot of. Increasing the amount of light you have will reduce the image noise, improve the color of your photo and enhance the overall quality of your picture.

To achieve this you can simply add a light source manually. Whether that is by using the LED you have inbuilt with your Android or taking advantage of your environment, there is usually a solution. Adjusting your position to the light sources can also drastically alter the photo you take, so keep that in mind when you next take a snap in low light sources.

Exposure

The length of time we allow our camera to be exposed to the photons we capture can improve the quality of the photograph as well as add some cool effects too. Longer exposure times can create moving trails of light for moving items, but a shaky hand will also result in blurry photos so you need to be very steady when tapping that “capture button”.

This can also cause photos to look incredibly bright, in which case you need to adjust the light sensitivity (as mentioned above) but reduce it rather than increase it.

The two apps below are designed to help you take great night photos without having to do too much in terms of adjusting complex exposure controls or sensitivity values. If you find that your stock camera app isn’t quite living up to your expectations, or if you just want something designed to take a night photo, try one of the apps below.