All you Need for Taking Awesome Phone Photos!
Today we will talk about tips that should help you in taking awesome phone photos! You don’t need to have a professional camera in order to take great photos. If you follow these tips, you might be surprised with the quality your phone photos will turn out to have!
- Find the Good Light
My first tip is light! Even though phones are getting better and better at taking photos in low light situations, shooting with your phone, in this sense, is the same as shooting with your camera: if you search for the good light, you will have much better photos. When you’re outdoors, cloudy days usually offer great light. Snowy days are also great to shoot. If you’re shooting on a sunny day, try shooting at times when the sun is not so high, especially if you’re shooting portraits. That way, you will avoid shadows on the face. Or if you don’t have an option but to shoot at mid-day, search for places where the sun won’t hit your subject directly.
If you’re indoors, sunny days are usually great, as you will get more light inside. And I don’t mean shooting in the sun but it’s just that when it’s sunny, our houses usually get more natural light in. A good tip is to shoot close to a window, that’s where you will have more light when you’re indoors.
If you’re shooting at night, try searching for light spots. Neon signs, any Christmas lights or maybe some led lights you might have at home or even any type of lights you have. Use them in your favor. Light is my number one tip for any type of photography. If you have good light, you’ve got 50% of the photo right.
2. Search for Nice Angles
Most people get their phones, point and shoot. If you want to take awesome phone photos, take a moment to explore some different perspectives. Here’s the same photo taken with me just standing there and pointing to the subject as people usually take photos and here is the same picture taken after I explored some different angles. (See video)
Go down on your knees, get up, switch sides, move some and try to get some different angles. Chances are you will get much better and unique photos! Plus, if you’re shooting portraits, there are some tips you might want to learn in terms of angles so you will not get body or facial distortions and if you want to know more about that, I have a video where I explain and shoot some practical examples of that. I will leave a link for it up here and also in the description.
3. Use the Grid
Use the gridlines to balance your photos. Activate it by going to Settings, Camera, and then activate the “grid” option if you’re using an iPhone. It shouldn’t be much different if you use android. Just activate the grid and then you can use one or more junctures of the lines to place what you want to be the main thing in your photo. This will help you to direct the attention to the subject in your photo and will make your pictures much more interesting for anyone who sees it.
4. Use the Negative Space
Another way of making great phone photos is to use the negative space in your advantage. And what negative space is, is all the area around the subject in the photo. Having more negative space in a photo, makes the subject stand out. If you use this tip along with the grid, you will get even more powerful images, as you will have your subject placed where human’s eyes tend to naturally rest when looking at a photo.
5. Use Leading Lines
Leading lines can also lead you to take some great shots with your phone. The leading lines are the lines used to draw the viewer’s eyes to the subject of the photo. Consciously or not, when we look at a photo, our eyes are naturally drawn to the lines present on that photo. That way, pointing lines to your subject or framing your subject with lines, is a great way to get people to be drawn to what really matters in your photo. Use that in your favor!
6. We Love Patterns
We love patterns! Patterns are so pleasing to the eyes. They are found everytime strong graphic elements repeat themselves and they can be lines, colors, texture, shapes, forms or whatever other sequence of elements you find around you.
7. Symmetry is Great
Just as we love patterns, we love symmetry. Human’s eyes are so pleased by symmetry. If you use the tips I gave you before: the grid along with leading lines and patterns, for example, to create symmetry in your photo, you will have a very powerful tool in your hands to go out there and take some amazing phone photos!
8. Mind your Focus
If you are careful about all of the tips I gave you but you forget the focus then you’ll just have locked your picture’s full potential of being an outstanding photo. Focus is super important for a good photo. A photo with no focus will not look as good or professional, so the tip I have for you today is: “mind your own focus”! In terms of focus, there are two tips I have that will help you to nail it:
First, choose your focus manually by clicking the spot in the screen where you want your focus to be. Especially if you’re shooting in portrait mode, this tip will be super helpful.
The second thing is: when you’re shooting, make sure you stand still and hold your phone firmly, with no movement. That will help you to avoid blurry images. A good tip to get more stability is to lock your elbows under your ribs, like this. That will give you more stability.
9. Get your Exposure Right
Exposure is king! An under or overexposed photo can kill your shot! Usually phones automatically do a great job in adjusting the exposure for you, but you can have full control of it by clicking the spot where you want to settle your exposure according to, for example, here… and then bring it up or down. This tip is great for sunset photos or for when you want to take some silhouette shots, underexposing your subject, for example.
10. No Zoom, Please
Yeah, I know it’s tempting. Sometimes we just want to get closer and have some more details of the subject but, believe me, if you want great looking phone photos the zoom is not your ally. It will just decrease the quality of your picture and, after taking care of so many small steps, you won’t want to mess this one up.
11. Use Portrait Mode
I know not all phones have the portrait mode, but, if yours do, use it! It’s amazing to create depth of field which will give your photos that creamy, soft and blurry background. The newer phones will even let you set the aperture of your lens, so if you have the possibility to play with the aperture, that’s a great deal!
12. Consider a Tripod
Tripods are great to take photos of yourself when you don’t want the classic selfie look of you holding the camera. It will definitely make your selfies look much more professional. It will also give you more versatility, as you can place the tripod anywhere and settle the timer to take photos of yourself in pretty much any situation. Plus, it is also a good way to avoid blurry photos!
You can find mini tripods that are great for phones in Amazon and a good one I have is this one from Manfrotto. And you can also consider a Gorilla Pod, that you can pretty much hang to anything in order to take your photos.
13. Clean your Phone’s Lens
This tip might sound obvious and stupid, but I swear, I was already a photographer when I made this mistake myself! I almost switched my phone because my phone photos looked like crap. I thought my phone’s camera had some kind of problem or something, because my photos looked so… I don’t know… blurry, muddy… then a friend looked at it and said: “have you tried cleaning your lens?”
Solved! Yeah, I know, I’m so stupid! You probably didn’t need to hear this tip… kind of things only I would do… anyway, I thought I’d share…
14. Be Creative
That’s right! Don’t be afraid to try! Move around, try different angles, try different things, put something in front of the lens to create depth, point the camera to the light, against the light, bring the exposure up and down, play with the focus, just try, try, try…! I don’t always make great photos. Many times I try to be creative, spend some time working on a photo’s idea and it sucks in the end! Part of the deal! If you want to make awesome phone photos, you have to give it a shot and allow yourself to make mistakes. Maybe you will get 5 bad images, but because of those 5 bad photos, you will get THE shot!! So go ahead and try… go ahead and try.
15. Work in Post/Use Technology in your Favor
This tip is just AMAZING and will allow you to do the final adjustments to your photos now that you already have your shots. There are two apps I find amazing to give it a final punch to my photos.
The first one if FOCOS. — Remember I said that some phones will let you set the aperture of your lens? Well, if yours doesn’t, this app will do that for you. Using impressive computational photography, it will let you accurately increase or decrease the amount of bokeh — the blurry background effect you find in portrait modes — in your photo. Also, this app will let you change the quality of the bokeh.
Even if you took a photo in portrait mode and the bokeh is not perfect, if you get these blurry edges to your photo, then you can fix them with this app and make your photo look just perfect!
It’s a pretty cool app that can add a special touch to some of your photos, especially the ones where you want to have more depth of field.
And the second app I want to talk about is Lens Distortion, or LD — I use this app even for some of the photos I take with my camera. I simply love it. The LD app will allow you to add flares, snow, rain, lights, fog and other different types of overlays to your photo. If you use it wisely, it’s a powerful tool to make some of your photos stand out. You gotta try it!
16. Edit your Photos!
Do some final light and color adjustments. This is the cherry of the cake of your photo and is what will make it look special and unique. Here’s what a simple 3 minutes editing in Lightroom mobile can do to your photo. (Check video to see it)
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I won’t go further into details about editing here, but if you want to learn a little bit about my editing process, I have an entire video where I edit two of my photos so you can watch it and follow the tips along while you edit your photo. There you will see me do my editing in the desktop version of Lightroom, but you can do the exact same thing with its mobile version. You will find the link for this video in the description of the video.
Enough! That’s all for today, folks! Now you have all the tools you need in order to make awesome phone photos! So no more excuses! go out there and shoot! Try it out and let me know if these tips actually did help you in taking awesome phone photos! I would absolutely love to know!
