If you’re a photographer who loves taking photos with your smartphone, you’ll know that there are a few tricks of the trade that can help you improve your work. From focus to exposure, these mobile photography tips every photographer should know will help you take better images.
A camera’s most basic adjustment is exposure, which allows you to brighten or darken a photo. Using this feature effectively can turn your boring scene into a jaw-dropping shot that will have your Instagram followers coming back for more.
Focus
When it comes to taking good photos, the focus is one of the most important factors. It can make or break a photo, which every photographer should know.
Mobile cameras often autofocus, which can be handy when taking a picture of a subject. But it can be problematic when the scene is a bit more complex.
Instead, adjust the focus manually to ensure that the main object in the frame is clear and sharp. To do this, open your camera app and tap the screen where you want to set your focus point.
It’s a simple yet effective tip that will help you produce stunning photos. Plus, it’s one of the easiest mobile photography tips to learn and will get you closer to being a pro.
Exposure
A smartphone camera needs to take into account the amount of light in a scene. Just like your eyes, the smartphone camera has an iris and an aperture that lets in more or less light depending on what it sees.
This is called exposure. Tapping your screen when the camera is on doesn’t just refocus; it adjusts the exposure.
You can use a vertical scale that appears on the phone’s screen when you focus on changing the amount of light it lets in.
You can also use an app to control your shutter speed and prevent motion blur. But the most important thing is to keep your phone steady while you shoot.
Aperture
Aperture affects the amount of light that reaches your smartphone’s camera sensor. Together with shutter speed and ISO, it controls how well your photos are exposed.
A wider aperture (small f-stop) allows more light to reach your sensor, creating a brighter photo. A narrower aperture (large f-stop) lets less light into your camera, making your image darker.
Aperture also affects depth of field, determining how much of your picture will be in focus. Smaller apertures create a deep depth of field, allowing you to keep a lot of your subject in focus, while larger apertures produce a shallow depth of field, which makes it easier to blur out backgrounds to highlight the focal point of your shot.
White Balance
When you take a photo, the camera tries to adjust the colors so that whites look white and other colors are reproduced accurately. This is called white balance, and it’s important for various reasons.
A good camera can correct this for you automatically if you use the automatic setting. However, if you’re not happy with the result, it’s easy to change it manually on your phone or camera app.
Most apps have a white balance slider that lets you choose the color temperature and tint of your image. This can be useful to change the overall mood of your photos.
ISO
One of the essential camera settings for mobile photography is ISO. It controls how sensitive the camera sensor is to light and affects how bright your images are.
A lower ISO value will give you more detail, and a higher value may add noise. This is why it is often best to keep ISO to a minimum.
The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive to light the camera has, and it will help you get a sharper image and avoid motion blur.
As a general rule, you don’t need to bump up your ISO any higher than 100-200 when shooting outdoors during the day. But for slightly darker conditions and indoors, you may want to boost it up to 200-400 or 400-800, depending on the lighting.
