You’ve heard the complaint before: Real cameras don’t have ringtones. That’s true, but it’s becoming less and less true every day. The high resolution cameras available on today’s tablets and smartphones can run circles around the professional digital cameras of a few years ago.

Finding the Camera app’s options and settings varies from device to device. Sometimes they appear onscreen (so touch the screen when you don’t see them) and other times they pop up when you touch the Menu button. Then you’ll have to wade through a series of sub- and sub-sub-menus to find the various commands.

Regardless of how you get there, the following list describes some of the many features and options you may find on your Android device’s camera, what they mean, and how best to use them.

Shooting Mode

The shooting mode refers to how the camera operates. It’s a broad-level category. For example, most cameras operate in single-shot mode. That means you touch the shutter button and you get one picture. Simple. Other shooting modes can include:

Action or Sports Shot. The camera takes several shots, one after the other, usually as long as you touch the shutter button.

Panorama. In this mode, the camera sets up a wide-field shot, usually directing you do pan or tilt the camera to take successive single shots. The Camera app software then assembles the multiple shots into a single, wide (or tall) image.

Photo Sphere. Like Panorama, this mode lets you capture a swath of the world around you, but in the full 360 degrees up down, left right, and all around.

Low-light. This mode is good for capturing images on night, when you don’t want to use a flash, or when the device lacks a flash.

Macro. Use the Macro mode for taking extreme close-ups, like Figure 1 where I took a snap of a very interesting bug I found in my shoe.

Figure 1. An interesting bug. Photo taken using the Macro shooting mode.

Scene Mode

This mode can easily be confused with Shooting Mode and, indeed, you’ll find some overlap. Generally speaking, scene mode covers multiple shots taken under specific circumstances. For example, scene mode settings may include Vistas, Night Shots, Indoors, Landscapes, Portraits, and so on.

I don’t find myself using the Scene Mode that often. When I was in France, I selected Night Mode for some great night shots of Nice, as shown in Figure 2. It worked, but I found that Night Mode seemed to drain power a lot faster than shooting with regular mode.

Figure 2. Nice, France, taken at night using Night Scene Mode.

Effects

Here’s where you can go nuts: Effects vary from device to device, with some camera apps offering a basic slate of effects and others going all nuts with them.

Basic effects include:

Monochrome. Also called grayscale or black-and-white, this mode removes all color elements from the shot.

Sepia. Like Monochrome, this mode removes color but it tints the image with a warm brown like a faded old photograph.

Negative. In this mode, colors are reversed, so things look odd — or the way most politicians see the world.

The array of weird effects seems endless. I’ve used one camera app that had so many effects they were listed in subcategories.

Most Camera apps let you preview the effects on the touchscreen. So messing with the various effects can be fun if you have the time to waste.

Even More Options!

This post lists only a handful of the many options you may find on the Camera app. Sometimes the controls grow so numerous I have no idea what the manufacturer was thinking. For example, I’m certain that anyone who knows what white balance is would never think of using a smartphone to snap a picture. Yet that option exists.

Good news is that Kitkat, the next Android release, apparently addresses the issue of options with an updated Camera app. I hope that rumor proves true. It doesn’t prevent some hardware manufacturer with providing their own enhancements, but at minimum I hope it adds some consistency across the many Android gizmos.