[LG V30 Guides, News, & Discussion] One Twelve:
What matters is distance to the lens of different point of the subject. If you reduce the relative difference in distance of those points to the lens then distortion reduces. And stepping away a little will do that.

A card is too small. You would need something wall sized. Well lit with easily visible straight lines. And consider this is only 2D. You are mostly photographing 3D. Wide angle is a whole new ball game :)

As apertures get wider to allow for low light they are more sensitive to bright light. Reds are harder to get right and end up sizzling magenta. This was less of a problem with phone cameras from years back as the apertures were much smaller f2.4+. Manual is more reliable and easier if available with any camera. Best light for this kind of shot is a cloudy day or when the sun is lower. Light will be more even and softer. Soft light means no shadow when you hold out your hand. Much better for portraits than harsh light which produces sharp shadows. The contrast is too high when the sun is overhead and ends up overloading fast aperture cameras. Good photos are all about light quality.

No, stepping away will reduce natural background blur because the sensor size is a fraction of the size of a full frame sensor. The only time you get background blur is if your within a foot of your subject. Which means your subject is tiny. If all you do is shoot action figures then great. Otherwise to get that background blur with humans means you need to get

cstark's gcam

ie. use the google camera as the V30 has no portrait mode. Two apk's there for the regular and wide angle. There is no one apk afaik that will work with both primary & wide.

Graphy thing isn't going to do much, its too small to be of use unlike on a DSLR where it can be used to check if your settings are right. That live light meter i first encountered on the Galaxy K zoom. I thought it was a great feature and expected it to make an appearance in the Note 4 that came out several months later. To my disappointment samsung completely ignored many of the innovative camera software features the k zoom introduced. LG was paying attention and the G4 that came out a year later incorporated all of these features. I'm still not sure at what point samsung introduced a live light meter into their galaxy S or note series.

It doesn't cause blur just softens details. You will have to experiment as its a double edged sword. Some scenes might benefit others will not. Tell us what you find and in what kind of scenes its appropriate.

Or catching moving children. YMMV

HDR only comes on in auto mode if set to on. If off it won't come on. If your subject isn't moving HDR will be ok. I tend to keep it off as it isn't always given subjects remain still. Besides tweaking exposures for brights and darks is always possible in google photos app.

Right, its for ultra low light situations. The result is a 4MP photo using pixel binning. I've not been very impressed with the results. If you want better low light just use a slow shutter and some stabilisation. This camera shutter can go as slow as 30s.

16:9 is a video aspect ratio. The phone camera world is a very strange one. Adopting aspects that make little sense. 16:9 is for landscapes only. In portrait its too tall and skinny. 4:3 is ideal in portrait mode. Less wide in landscape. 18:9 is just more silliness because companies want to sell bigger screens and the only way to do that is to make them thinner and taller.

Ideal aspect for me is 3:2 but very few phones offer that. 3:2 is a print standard and works well in either landscape or portrait. Standard with compacts & DSLR.

You don't want to be cropping 16:9 to 4:3 as you're losing twice that way given native resolution is 4:3 on the V30

Up to you if you like this aspect.

No wide and ultra wide lenses in there ?

Video will be good and the manual controls here will improve things further. It's the audio that's the hard part. Well, they do perfectly fine with acoustic recordings but electric guitars and over drive is something else entirely.

Phones are limited in size and this limits their capacity to an extent as well. What gets me is distance to the performer, whether the performance is outdoors (open roof) or indoors and the accompanying acoustics play a huge role in how good the audio recording comes out. If all else fails a H1n zoom recorder and then dubbing that back on the video might improve things.

The problem with recording loud noise levels on a phone is the auto gain control can get in the way. So enter manual audio controls. This will take experimenting with limiting and gain control. Closer you are to the audio source the better. What happens when sound levels get too loud is the V30 mics turn off and the headset speaker gets used as a mic. This occurs around the 130dB and above i believe

You will have to monitor the levels meter to get an idea. I've found bass is better retained if settings are set properly. Check out this

video

and the dates around it on that channel.