Taking pictures is fun. It’s an ego trip. Armed with a camera, anyone can slice the world into tiny planes of expression. Photography can be art, history, science, or just plain interesting. But how can you escape the mundane?

The inspiration for this HOWTO came from a friend who reminded me that the greats of photography worked with primitive equipment, and that even the simple cameraphone was enough to create art. So I grabbed my camera phone and took some very average shots. I then I applied a few simple tweaks using the Gimp, and the results were surprising. In the end, good photography is more than just equipment and light.

It turns out that the process is really quite simple:

1. Shoot. Get closer. Try different angles, and take several shots.
2. Crop. Rotate. Find the interestingness.
3. Blur the image and reduce the camera noise (unless it looks cool).
4. Adjust the levels.
5. Fit the contrast to the texture of the image. Higher contrast for crispy, lower for fluffy.
6. Nudge the colours. Try different tones and saturations.
7. If the colours are really horrid (or the image is still noisy), drop to black-and-white.