5 top tips to help you take better pictures with your phone today
Being able to capture a moment, scene or memory with a great photo is a wonderful thing. To help create great images there are a few things that you should consider when snapping away. We have created a short little list of 5 things to try and help you take better pictures today. Hopefully these little tips and tricks will help you, in this blog we talk about composition, editing, lighting and more.
Exposure:
We have all been in the same situation where we have pulled our phones out on a sunny day, snapped a couple of pictures and then gone back to look at them later. They are all overexposed and completely blown out. We’re here to help that stop happening with a fairly simple little tip.
To fix this issue, when you have the camera open, all you need to do is tap on the screen where you want it to focus. A little yellow box will appear with a sun next to it, this is the exposure and focus lock, this is on iPhone, other icons may vary depending on device. Now if you drag your finger up and down on the screen you’ll see the exposure change (it’s always better to under expose than over expose, it’s easier to fix in post).
Now when you take your photos you won’t have any over exposed images anymore.
Rule of thirds:
The rule of thirds is known throughout the world of art and photography. Luckily the most smartphones have a grid setting that lets you see where the thirds are on your camera. You just need to go into your camera settings and turn it on.
The rule of thirds allow the composition of the image to improve vastly. The fundamentals of the rule of thirds is that item of interest, weather is be a person, dog or tree, they should be placed along the third of the image, no matter if it’s in portrait or landscape capture. The rule of thirds helps the overall balance of the image, no it does not mean that you have to apply it to ever single image you take, but it’s something to consider when snapping away.
Lighting:
Lighting is a very important item to consider when looking at the image you are about to take as a whole. The lighting that’s in the image can affect the mood and how the image looks. Golden hour is something that is used in photography and filming, because the sun is the kinder and softer, it occurs just after sunrise and just before sunset. Those two time slots are the best time to take photos with natural lighting.
The best tool for you that is free, and will always be free is natural light. A few little tips if you are wanting to get the best lighting that you able to. If you are indoors, get the person, or place the object you are taking a photo of next to a window, let the natural light into the room and do the work for you.
Embrace the sun and the grey. The sun will give you bright and light images that will capture the mood, but don’t forget that grey days have their advantages too. On grey days you’ll find your images have much more shadows and areas where the light helps you out, they give a much more uniform amount of light to your photos overall.
Overall if you are outside taking photos of anything, just remember the previous point above, you can also control the focus and exposure if you’re not quite happy with how things look.
Editing:
When you have your images in front of you, but in your opinion there is just a little something missing. This is when editing can really help you. Now we don’t mean adding in dragons or explosions into the background, or putting you on the moon or anything, we mean little helping touches with the colours, saturation and cropping the image.
Going each of the mentioned above, in our opinion the best two apps that are user friendly and give you the best results are VSCO and Lightroom for mobile. These apps will help you take every aspect of the image and edit them. When using these apps, the piece of advice we would give to you is sometimes, less is more. VSCO has presets that you can use for free, but they themselves can be edited (presets are in the most basic sense of it an overlay for your image). When further editing your photos the main few items I would take into special consideration is: exposure, contrast, if you need to crop the photos size and if you need to sharpen the image at all. If you are new to editing photos, VSCO is without doubt a great place to start and you can see what each setting does live on your images.
Take more than one:
There is nothing worse than coming home from seeing your friends, being on holiday or going to an event and coming home and you’ve only taken 1 photo each time you’ve got your camera on your phone out. So our last one is our shortest tip, but always and we do mean always take more than one image of the same thing. It gives you options when you go to look at them later on, and you can always get rid of the spare ones, be snap happy!
We have compiled this little quick list of 5 tips for you, we hope they help you out, they’re quite easy to apply to the photos you take today. If you have any other questions or are interested in out other blogs, check out some of our previous blogs.