Several months ago I created the EasyCamera project (GitHub). As there has been a lot of interest, I just released it to Maven central, so that you don’t need to checkout & build it yourself. The packaging is also changed to aar now.

I would appreciate all reported issues and feedback about the API. Let me just remind the usage:

EasyCamera camera = DefaultEasyCamera.open();
CameraActions actions = camera.startPreview(surface);
PictureCallback callback = new PictureCallback() {
    public void onPictureTaken(byte[] data, CameraActions actions) {
        // store picture
    }
}
actions.takePicture(Callbacks.create().withJpegCallback(callback))

I won’t paste the code that you would normally have to write, but you should follow 10 steps, and I believe the EasyCamera API is a bit friendlier, easier to discover and harder to misuse.