How to take a picture without an Intent and without any view window in Android

Good day all, I am trying to figure out how to take a picture by pressing a button, without any preview showing up. The idea is, I want a picture to be taken and saved, but no visual preview of the photo before or afterwards. So far, I am able to get the code to take pictures and save them to the disk without any problems, but I cannot seem to do it without a surfaceview or preview.

Here is some of my code:

Main Activity:

public class MainActivity extends Activity implements OnClickListener {

        private Camera cameraObject;
        private ShowCamera showCamera;
        private Button NOPE;

        //Check if camera is avail:
        public static Camera isCameraAvailiable(){
            Camera object = null;
            try {
              object = Camera.open();
                L.m("Camera Open");
            } catch (Exception e) {
              L.m(e.toString());
            } return object; 
        }

       protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
          super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
          setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

          //Opens up the camera
          cameraObject = isCameraAvailiable();

          //Sets the resolution for the camera (Excluded from code here)
          setCameraResolution();

          //Button for taking photos
          NOPE = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button_capture);
          NOPE.setOnClickListener(this);

          //THIS SECTION OF CODE HERE I can't get it to work without it as this creates a view/ preview for the camera
          showCamera = new ShowCamera(this, cameraObject);
          FrameLayout preview = (FrameLayout) findViewById(R.id.camera_preview);
          preview.addView(showCamera);
       }

        public void snapIt(View view){
           cameraObject.takePicture(null, null, new PhotoHandler(getApplicationContext()));
       }

        public void onClick(View view) {
            switch (view.getId()){
            case R.id.button_capture:
                    snapIt(view);
            }
        }   
    }

The photo handler class:

public class PhotoHandler implements PictureCallback {

    private final Context context;

    public PhotoHandler(Context context) {
        this.context = context;
    }

    public void onPictureTaken(byte[] data, Camera camera) {

        File pictureFileDir = getDir();
        if (!pictureFileDir.exists() && !pictureFileDir.mkdirs()) {
            //I removed unnecessary code here, but this is where I write to disk, which works fine.
        }
    }

The problem I am having is that I CANNOT actually take a photo via the camera unless I have the code about preview.addView(showCamera);. The ShowCamera class is merely one that adds a surface view for viewing the pictures while they are being taken:

public class ShowCamera extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback

Anyone have any ideas? Can this be done?

Someone asked an EXTREMELY similar question here: Taking picture without SurfaceView or without Photo Intent Activity , but without any success. I think I'm on a similar path as they were.