Phone photography

The single biggest improvement available. Tap the idol's face, then drag the exposure slider down until the face is correctly lit and the surroundings go dark. Left alone, the phone will expose for the dark pandal and turn the face into a white blob.

Most phones let you lock exposure by holding on the tap point. Learn where that is on yours before you are standing in a queue.

Night mode is genuinely good and it needs you to hold still for one to three seconds. It works for a pandal, an empty lane, a lighting arch. It does not work for a person walking, a dhaki playing, or anything else that moves — those come out as smears.

For moving subjects, turn night mode off and accept a darker, noisier, sharp photograph.

Digital zoom throws away pixels. If your phone has a real telephoto lens, use it by tapping the 2× or 3× button; anything beyond the lens's native reach is a crop you could do better at home.

The ultrawide is the useful one here. Pandal interiors are exactly what it is for.

Camera plus torch plus maps plus a struggling network will flatten a phone by ten at night. Power bank, low-power mode early, and stop recording video of the whole walk — nobody watches it, including you.

Get low. A phone held at chest height in a crowd photographs the backs of heads; crouched, with the phone near waist level and angled up, you get the pandal and the lights above the people.

Use the doorway. Almost every pandal has an entrance arch that frames the idol perfectly, and standing just inside it gives you a foreground, a subject and a reason for the shape of the picture.

Shoot vertical for the pandal interiors, which are tall, and horizontal for the street. Deciding before you raise the phone saves you cropping later.

Edit down. A hundred and forty photographs of one evening is a folder nobody opens; nine is an evening somebody remembers.

Lift the shadows a little and pull the highlights down — that combination undoes most of what harsh pandal lighting does to a phone photograph, and it takes about four seconds per picture.