How to take great photos with the Nokia 6300

The 2 megapixel camera on the Nokia 6300 allows you to take still images at resolutions up to 1600x1200 pixels, and capture video at up to 176x122.

To activate the camera, either:

• Go to Menu, Media, Camera
• Press the Up navigation key (if your nav keys have been set up with this shortcut).

Taking images
With the camera active, the mobile's screen becomes your viewfinder. To take a photo, press the middle seclection key.

The 6300’s camera has an 8x digital zoom facility. To zoom in or out on the subject, press the up navigation button (zoom in) or the down navigation button (zoom out). The magnification of the image is visible on-screen, and reflected in the zoom bar on the right of the screen. The larger the darker area, the closer you’ve zoomed in.

The Options menu contains additional photo tools. Click Options, highlight your option and click Select to activate:

• Night mode: the slightly slower exposure captures more light in poor conditions;
• Flash: an LED flash for use in very poor lighting;
• Self-timer: gives 10 seconds between pressing Capture and taking the photo. With camera sound on, bleeping rate increases until the photo is taken;
• Image sequence: captures four images over the course of one second;
• Effects: switches between normal (colour), Greyscale, Sepia (brown tint) and Negative images. The chosen effect is reflected on the viewfinder screen.
• White balance adjusts the colour temperature of an image according to the light conditions. The 6300's White balance options are Daylight, Fluorescent, Tungsten and Auto.

Camera settings
The Settings option in the Options menu lets you set the resolution, quality and saving preferences for the Nokia 6300’s camera. Select Options, Settings to see the available options:

Image quality: sets the compression ratio of the captured image. High-quality images will be better but will take up more memory;
Image size: a choice of five image sizes, from 1600x1200 down to 160x120 pixels;
Image preview time: the amount of time the photo stays on your screen until the phone returns to camera capture mode. You also have the option to end the preview manually;
Camera sounds: switches the capture click and self-timer sounds on or off;
Default title: by default, photo names begin with ‘image’ followed by the next available number (eg image001.jpg). To change this name to something more relevant (eg ‘holiday’ or ‘birthday’), select Default title, choose My title, enter your choice and click OK;
Image and video storage: by default, the phone will save your images into its built-in memory. At only 8MB, this is unlikely to hold more than a few dozen images, so to switch the default saving destination to the SD card, highlight Image and video storage, click Select, highlight Memory card, click Select and your photos will now be saved into the Images folder on the memory card.

After you’ve set your preferred resolution, image quality and saving location, the number of images you can fit on the card at the chosen resolution is displayed - along with an icon designating the saving location - at the top right of the camera screen.