I am writing an android 1.5 application which starts just after boot-up. This is a service and should take a picture without preview. This app will log the light density in some areas whatever. I was able to take a picture but the picture was black. After googling like crazy, i came across a bug thread about it. If you don't generate a preview, the image will be black since android camera needs preview to setup exposure and focus. I've created a surfaceview and listener but the onSurfaceCreated event never gets fired. I guess the reason is, the surface is not being created visually. I've also seen some examples of calling the camera statically with MediaStore.CAPTURE_OR_SOMETHING which takes a picture and saves in the desired folder with two lines of code but it doesn't take a picture too. Do i need to use ipc and bindservice to call this function or do you have any suggestion to achieve my goal (taking a picture without preview) and if so, would you give me a small piece of code as example?