smartphone photography tips and tricks

Smartphone cameras dont have the best bokeh from their wide-angle lenses, meaning its hard to achieve DSLR-like background blur with medium range shots (unless you have some fancy tools like the Duo Camera on the HTC One M8). How do you achieve that pleasant blur? Simply get closer to the subject of your shot, utilizing the close macro range of the focus system. Some of the best photos Ive achieved with a smartphone have been macro-style, using the small amount of bokeh thats achievable to my advantage. On an f/2.4 camera system, like the LG G2 or Nokia Lumia 930, dont expect anything incredible; but if youre blessed with an f/2.0 system like the Sony Xperia Z2 results can be surprising.

If you want to get serious about smartphone photography, its crucial that your photos are lit well. Small sensors typically found in phones are not very capable when lighting gets poor, so its always best to ensure your subject is well lit when taking a shot. If you can use your camera at ISO 100 or lower, youll see less grain in the resultant image, and photos will look clearer and more impressive. One way to achieve better lighting for your smartphone photos is to get strong artificial lights, but this probably isnt practical or worth it considering its not a DSLR. The flash also tends not to be so great, so you can rule that out as well. This leaves natural light as the best source, and there are a few tips to getting the best shots in the lighting you have.

Most software allows you to take a panorama shot, the trick here is to have a model run couter-panorama wise and post at various stages of the panorama. This will crate the appearance of them being present at multiple places at once. If you do end up making one, tag it #panodash.

Instead of moving the camera around to create a 360 degrees panorama, you can do a parallel panorama by keeping the camera at a steady position while driving. This creates a different panorama altogether.

While you can probably get a zoom lens off of amazon for less then $10, you may already have such a lens at home if you own a pair of field binoculars. Or even a pair of kids binoculars.

If you dont have a DVD available for sacrificing a macro lens, you can simply apply a small drop of water on the smarphone lens to get it to shoot macro. The curved drop will act as a macro filter. Be careful not to get water anywhere else in your phone.

This is a hack we talked about a lot when DIYP was younger, but we never discussed applying it to smartphonography. The idea is to get some cool reflections on the cheap by using a car sun reflective sun shade. The idea is that a little bit of reflected light can either open up the shadows or provide a hard light look, depending on how oyu use it. Thats another $10 well spent on Amazon, or you can probably get ti for a buck in your neighborhood Dollar Store.

If you need to get some distance from your phone for a self portrait, you can actually use your headphone as a shutter release. And if you are looking for a small tripod you can try this credit card tripod design here, or any of those nifty, albeit more complex, designs.

This one is a bit risky for my taste, but you can snap an shallow under water photo by placing a phone in a cup and using the cup for water protection.

The great thing about smartphone photography is the ease of which you have to process your captured image. While it might not be true that every photograph looks better with a filter, it is certainly true that filters can add interest to an otherwise boring photo. That said you shouldnt simply think oh well Ill just add a filter to it to make it awesome instead think that would look really cool with this filter! and then shoot your photo accordingly.