Smartphone Photography: How To Take Better Pictures With Your Phone

You need a good camera to take good quality pictures – this is just a fact of life. Yet another fact of life is that some of the most beautiful, funniest and picture-worthy moments of our life happen suddenly and without warning, often leaving you no time to reach for your DLSR.

When that happens, knowing how to take a quick and good snapshot with your phone camera becomes an invaluable skill. Here are a few ideas on how to add quality to your mobile pictures.

Clean Your Lens

Let’s start with the basics. As obvious as it may seem, this step is frequently forgotten. But just give your lens a swipe and you will be surprised at the difference it will make to your everyday pictures.

Let There Be Light!

When it comes to lights, phone cameras demonstrate their biggest handicap: it’s very hard to take a good mobile picture in low light. So in order to work around this disadvantage, you need to do your best to get as much light on the subject of your picture as possible. And don’t forget the basic rule: your subject should be facing the light, while you shouldn’t.

Do Not Overflash

If you are lacking light, cracking up your flash might seem like a natural choice. However, you should think twice before making flash your default “on” feature. True, it can help brighten things up when you are low on light, but in other cases the white LED light may be way too harsh and actually spoil the shot. So, if you do have the luxury of time, try snapping a shot with flash and then without – to see which one works better for this particular light.

Fix Exposure

With light being a major issue with phone photography, tweaking exposure settings may make the biggest difference. Higher exposure will let more light into the lens, resulting in brighter pictures and overall better pictures. This may as well be one of the most important settings to work with in mobile photography.

Zoom Is Overrated

As you may already very well know, using zoom on your phone camera is not what it’s all cracked up to be. All the zoom does is crop the picture to make the subject appear bigger (which you can easily do in post-editing, without sacrificing the resolution). So if it is an option – forget about the zoom and just take a step closer.

Check Your Resolution

As most cameras allow you to adjust resolution – why not benefit from the option. Once again, what you choose depends on what you are looking for. Low-resolution pictures are easy to send via email or chat – so if you saw a funny sign and can’t wait to share with friends – bring the resolution down. And if you want to take a few cool quality picture – tweak it up, so that they also look good on your desktop.

Get A Good Camera App

Your default app may surely come with lots of settings and tweaking option. But if you do plan to use your phone for moment-capturing quite a lot, you might want to opt for a more professional option, like CameraZOOM FX (Android), for instance.

Post –production

If despite all the precautions taken, the picture still did not come out as you wanted it too – there is always editing. If you are good with Photoshop – just copy the picture to your desktop and work on the problems.

However if you are looking for a quick fix and don’t have the time for substantial editing – there are always these simple methods:

• Go Black & White

Changing your picture to black and white can get rid of a number of issues, like lack of light or brightness. Additionally, it can add a touch of unintentional sophistication to your pictures – allowing you to turn a quality mishap into a stylistic advantage.

• Use The Filters

If you are an Instagram user, you may have already come to think of these small helpful tweaks as life-savers. Turning bad pictures into “postable” ones, filters can also work wonders when you have a good shot that you do not look good in: some intentional blurring, a bit of filtered sun – and your face will still look recognizable but not clear enough to spot that forced smile.

With all of that said, there is no use denying that picture quality will depend (to no small extent) on your smartphone model and capabilities. And if you believe that taking pictures is one of your top activities, you should consider picking a phone with the camera to match your expectations. Luckily, there is no shortage of options. Check out our smartphone section for some quality ideas with a reasonable price.

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