5 Tips to Improve Your Phone Photography
You don’t have to buy a fancy camera to take amazing pictures, but if you are shopping around then check out what I keep in my camera bag here! Thanks to our mobile devices and editing apps, we can all enjoy high-quality photos. With a few simple tricks, I’ll have people thinking you paid someone to take your photos!
1. Clean those lenses!
Your mobile phone spends a lot of time in your hands, your pockets, your bags, or if you have kiddos… mine gets too excited while video chatting that she gives the phone a lot of attention, with her mouth. It’s inevitable that the lenses will get covered in dust, dirt, and fingerprints. A dirty lens can cause blurry images, dust spots, or even smudges. All of those with inhibit you from getting a nice clean and clear image. Make sure to use nice, soft cloth to gently wipe your lens and be careful not to scratch them.
2. Use gridlines
This one is super easy and it will improve your mobile photography immensely! If you haven’t already, go into your camera’s settings and turn on ‘grid’ or ‘grid lines’.
To put this into practice, a rule you should follow until you learn it (and then break it to push creative boundaries) is the “rule of thirds”. This is a photographic composition principle that breaks an image down into thirds, horizontally and vertically, giving you nine parts in total. In doing this, you’ll want to place points of interest in these intersections or along the lines to make your photo balanced, level, and allow viewers to interact with it more naturally.
To do this:
iPhone: Go to “Setting,” choose “Photos & Camera,” and switch “Grid” to on.
Google Pixel: Launch the camera app, go to “settings,” scroll down to “Grid type” and select the grid ratio you want to choose.
3. Tap to focus
Mobile phone camera's typically focus on the foreground of your frame, but not every picture you take will have an obvious subject or you might want to blur the foreground for a creative affect.
To adjust the camera focus, open your camera app and tap the screen where you want to sharpen the view. A box or a circle will appear to indicate the focus point and then you just press the shutter button to take your photo.
Bonus: If you are trying to take a nice image and want everything in the background to be blurred and your camera has the ability, use ‘Portrait Mode’. This image was taken in portrait mode to focus on the toy ball and blur everything behind it.
4. Lighting
This tip might be one of the most important and it will make or break an image. Your image will be much clearer if your subject is better lit. I’ll explain a run down on how to achieve the best natural lighting, but here’s how to adjust your brightness manually: tap to set focus, then swipe up or down to adjust exposure.
Swiping up will make the image brighter and down will make it darker.
Quick Lighting Tips:
Outside: light behind the subject
Inside: face the subject toward (or 45 degrees from) the light source
Use natural lighting as much as possible (turn off artificial lights)
underexposed image, appears dark and unflattering
adjusted lighting
5. Experiment
Experimenting and finding your creativity can empower you and your shots. Play with different angles, subjects, colors, lighting and learn how your camera works on your phone.
A few more tips to follow:
Hold the camera steady, get a portable phone tripod if needed.
Don’t zoom, it compromises quality. You can crop the image later.
Hold down the shutter button for a rapid fire. This helps with action shots.
Use editing apps to add filters and bring out colors. You can get my mobile filters here and use them in the free Lightroom app!
Now get out there and start shooting! As I said before, you don’t need a fancy camera to capture moments and memories, so happy shooting and I can’t wait to see what you create!
All of these images were taken on my Google Pixel, and some were edited with my mobile filter pack.
xoxo,
Searra (313 Studios Photography)
