smartphone photography tips and tricks

If youre going to go out and make pictures that impress your friends, youre going to need good light. What is good light, exactly? Good light is the kind of light that gives a scene shape, depth and makes things look interesting. Generally, shooting indoors with artificial light or outdoors midday or with overcast skies is bad, flat and boring light. Youll know flat light when you see it - there are few shadows, if any, and everything looks evenly lit. Look for light with some kind of direction and color. This type of light happens naturally at just before sunrise and at sunset. Alternatively, window light is great because it has direction and its often soft and a little diffuse, so its not harsh on your subjects.Good light is especially important in mobile photography because you cant create much more interest with different focal lengths and varying depth of field. Youre stuck with one focal length, and one aperture setting. Its a very good exercise in shooting light and finding good composition.

Say youre at a beautiful location, the light is gorgeous and everything is ripe for a great photo. But nothings happening. Its like looking through your Instagram or Facebook feed: there are hundreds of sunset photos with nothing but just sunsets. Thats it. Instead, find something to complement the scene if you can. Maybe its just someone walking by. Wait until the shape of the walking person balances the photo and is at peak action, then snap away. Sometimes, there are no moments. Nothing is happening. Theres no one around, and its just a pretty scene. It wont hurt to take the photo. Do that and keep it for yourself or share it with close people and tell a story along with it.

What does it mean when a photographer tells you to work the scene? It means almost that - work it! Dont just stand there, compose and snap one photo and move along. Maybe a better shot will come along in a minute, or in five minutes. Or perhaps youd get a better photo of your subject by standing closer, or further away. Maybe the photo would look better from a lower angle, or a higher one. Or you can compose the same scene in a different way, or three different ways. Taking a good photo means giving it some thought. Otherwise youre just taking snapshots, and unless you get really lucky, your chances of getting a good photo that way are slim. Dont be afraid to take many photos. You can always delete them later, and you have plenty of memory on your smartphone. When you see something that really catches your eye, work that scene. And if there is a moment about to happen, shoot through it. That means keep shooting photos until the moment is over, then pick the best one.

You cant expect to practice the piano once a week and play a Chopin Etude by the end of the year. At least, most of us wouldnt be able to do that. And you cant expect the same from photography. If you only take photos once in a blue moon, its going to take you a very long time before you can start taking photos that impress your friends. Try shooting a little every day. If youre lacking inspiration some days, shoot anyway. Shoot whats in front of you, even if it could end up being another dreaded food photo. Why not try to make it look more interesting than the clich

Knowing how the automatic shooting mode on your smartphone camera works can greatly help you take good photos. Take the time to learn when it uses high ISOs, when it uses long shutter speeds, and adjust how you take photos accordingly. It especially helps to know when you decide to

Smartphones can be pretty good when it comes to choosing settings, but not always. Metering can sometimes be pretty shoddy indoors and in cloudy conditions, which is where overriding some of the settings can come in handy. If you think the white balance is off, change it. If the photo is underexposed, use the sliders found in most camera applications to boost it. If youd prefer grain to blur, up the ISO used by the camera manually. Dont forget about the flash either, which is sometimes necessary.

A key method for reducing blur is knowing how to hold a smartphone camera in a stable way. Holding your arms outstretched or far away from your body can make them sway more when photographing. Moving your elbows into the sides of your body can give a bit of extra stability where needed, as can physically resting the smartphone on a stable object. If you want perfect stability, it is possible to get a tripod attachment that you can slot your smartphone into. Youll probably look a bit silly bringing a tripod out and about to use with your phone, but I have seen and achieved myself some fantastic shots with a tripod in hand.

Dynamic range the range of light intensities a camera can capture in the one photo while preserving detail tends to be a weak point in smartphone cameras. In scenes with both dark and bright areas, such as a shadowed forest, its difficult to capture detail in the shadows and highlights at the same time. This is where HDR mode, or high dynamic range mode, comes into play. HDR mode takes two images of different exposures near-simultaneously, and then combines them to produce one image that has higher dynamic range than the sensor can normally achieve. On most smartphones, this is something you can and should enable when the scene youre photographing has widely varying contrast. The difference in photos can be vast, especially on Samsung smartphones where the HDR mode is particularly effective.

Something that really irks me about smartphone OEMs is their choice to always default to a 16:9 image capture ratio even if the sensor itself is not 16:9. You wont have to do anything if you have a smartphone with a 16:9 sensor like the Galaxy S5 or HTC One M8, but if you dont, switching back to standard 4:3 can be beneficial. Shooting in 4:3 on a 4:3 sensor not only gives you access to the full resolution of the camera, but it still allows you to crop down to 16:9 after the fact with more pixels to play with. Didnt frame the shot perfectly the first time? Well if you were shooting in 4:3 and using the whole sensor, you might be able to get a better photo out of your shot.

You dont have to use the default camera application on your smartphone. Check the Google Play Store, App Store or Windows Phone Store on your respective device and look for a standout camera app. Look online to see what people are saying, because there are some gems out there that can add features and controls to the smartphone photography experience. Camera Zoom FX, as silly as it may sound, is a really solid camera replacement for Android devices. If youre using a Windows Phone and its made by Nokia, make sure youre using Nokia Camera. As for iOS, Camera+ and ProCamera are some applications to consider.