Smartphone Photography Tips and Tricks
Smartphone photography is now an art form, and here are some great tips.
21. Use HDR mode
If youve got stable hands and are taking photos of stationary objects, then you should use HDR (high dynamic range) mode if you want lighting and shadows in the photo evenly exposed. This is particularly useful if its picture with high contrast lots of particularly dark and particularly light bits. HDR mode takes two or more pictures of varying exposures almost simultaneously, then combines the best and brightest bits of both into one photo. Keep the camera super-steady when you use HDR mode, otherwise your photo will come out blurred.
22. Use those post processing filters
There are plenty of people out their who pour scorn onto all the lovely filters you can enhance your photos with. Sure, if youre a professional photographer then you may consider them bogus, but then what are you doing using an all-digital smartphone camera anyway? For the casual smartphone photographer, those retro, black-and-while, Windmere, Islandia, and other hipster filters can really add character to a photo. These days, most Android smartphones come with a great selection of filters, but if youre running a bit short try Pixlr (formerly Pixlr Express) for a great selection.
23. The reflective sunglasses trick
If youve got a pair of sunglasses with a reflective coating on the lens, you can capture a good perspective on some shots. A good tip for this is that you should always have the light source being reflected off the lens so that you can better capture whatever scene or action in your view.
24. Make one subject appear several times in a Panorama shot
The Google Camera app has been available in the Play Store for some time now,
25. The rule of thirds
This is one of the simplest, easiest rules to remember about photography, and yet its invaluable to making your photo compositions look great. The idea is that our eyes are naturally attracted to images that are divided into thirds, and the subject of the photo looking off-centre slightly. To help you achieve this, most smartphone cameras let you use a grid of two horizontal and two vertical lines when taking photos. The subject of your photo should be at one of the four intersections of these lines to theoretically get the most visually-pleasing photo.
26. Augmented color reality
Colorify Augmented Reality is a fairly unknown app available on the Google Play Store. With it, you can just pick and choose a garment or object and change the color to anything you want. Just a point of advice when using this app, the more contrast in the photo, the better it works. Its also worth noting that Colorify
27. Tiny Planet
This is one of the cooler photo-editing tricks you can do - combining your panoramic photos into a globe effect called Tiny Planets. Weve got two apps that you can use to accomplish this effect. The first one, Tiny Planet FX, isnt free but has some spectacular options to customize the effect. The second app, Small Planet, is free. It requires a little fiddling around in order to get used to it, but once you do you can create some truly spectacular snaps.
28. Phones Can See Infrared
If you shoot an infrared beam directly into your phones camera, the otherwise invisible light renders as a purplish beam in the phones display. There are not many practical applications here, except perhaps allowing you to confirm if your TVs remote control is indeed running low on batteries.
This happens because most digital camera sensors have the ability to pick up frequencies of light invisible to the human eye. But sometimes they will (imprecisely) translate these frequencies into the displays image. We were able to recreate this glitch on a variety of modern Android devices (the Galaxy S5 and S6, Moto X, One M9, and Nexus 7) and even on one old-school Samsung flip phone. However, we were not able to see the beam of light render on an iPhone 6 or iPad Air 2. This is probably because these devices have superior IR Cut Filters, which theoretically make for better photos.
29. Your Phone Plays Nicely with Telescopes
Its a simple, but useful little trick that people may not know. Just stick your phones lens right up to the telescope and youll be able to capture the magnified image on the other side. The above photo was taken by my phone through a telescope during my honeymoon in Costa Rica. I think there was supposed to be a bird or something, but it was a jerk and flew away before I took the shot. Works with binoculars, too!
30. Cheap Phone Sensors Can Be Cool
If youve ever tried capturing a fast-moving object on your phones camera, you might have noticed it doesnt look quite right. The reason is that most consumer smartphone cameras utilize CMOS sensors, which capture images in a line-by-line sequence (AKA a rolling shutter) as opposed to a more expensive CCD image sensor which captures all the action at once (AKA a global shutter). When capturing a still image, there isnt much of a discernable difference. But if something is moving quickly, the picture may appear warped as the object(s) may have moved by the time the next line has rendered, thus causing warping (sometimes known as jellocam).