6 Tips For Good Smartphone Photography

Smartphone photography is the most commonly used system of photography in our time. This is very common because it is compact, most people have one with them at all times and many can take photos at any place at a time.

To kick the ball rolling, we are going to look at six tips you can follow for good smartphone photography. With this knowledge in hand, you will be able to produce quality and awesome shots from your mobile camera.

Auto Mode

Having knowledge on how your smartphone camera auto mode works will greatly help you take good photos. Study the time it uses high ISOs, when it uses long shutter speeds, and adjust how you take photos accordingly.

This will help you know when the auto mode struggles, and then you can decide to override the default settings where appropriate.

Override The Defaults

Smartphone photography is always better than ever when in default settings mode automatically, but this is not always right. Photography indoors and overcast days can still leave us a lot to desire even with the best camera’s in the markets.

The white balance and exposure is mostly set to automatic by default. Most smartphones can manually adjust these settings to suit your style. The best manual mode also allows you to adjust the white balance of your camera.

At the same time, manual modes allow you to change ISO and Shutter speed as well, allowing you to set the motion blur to be present in your photos and how much grain will be visible.

Longer shutter speeds less than 1/30 of seconds will require study hands if possible must be set on a tripod. ISOs above 800 on the smartphone cameras tend to introduce clearer grain but captures adequate lights than lower ISOs.

Its advisable to play around these settings to find the best combination for the shots you want to have, importantly, most advanced smartphones coming in now have these comprehensive manual modes.

If you tweak your camera to centre-weighted metering and it doesn’t provide the right results for you, consider switching to spot-metering. Center-weighted sets the camera to capture the entire image and meters according to what it sees, with a preference on the centre of the image.

If your subject is off-centre, switch to spot-metering so the area around the spot will be exposed perfectly.

Use Good Posture

If you want to reduce blur in your images, the best option is to hold a smartphone camera in a stable way. Position your body in a way there would be no distraction or shaky movement.

If you need a perfectly stable image, I would recommend using tripod for your shots. The tripods are handily very useful as it can be used for still images. We personally used tripods for some shots and trust you me, you would love the outcome of your images.

Never Digitally Zoom

The image above depicts a photo taken while digitally zoomed versus a photo taken without digital zoom. You can see that from the one digitally zoomed, the picture has been enlarged and cropped from the sensor before the photo was captured rendering the image to lose some details.

When this happens, after the image is taken, there is no way the image can be reframed or edited but with the one without zoom, the image can be reframed and edited using any editing software.

Some advanced phones of late like the iPhone 11 and 11pro, Samsung s20 and others have 2x optical zoom, it’s best to stick with 1x zoom or 2x as this will give you the full quality of the wide-angle and the zoom respectively.

Take Multiple Shots

It’s worth it when you take several shots in quick succession. When taking photos of dynamic or fast-moving objects – like people, pets, car, etc. taking multiple photos will allow you to select the best shot later, without stressing yourself to have a perfect image the first shot.

Some phones have the feature to combine multiple shots and the best part into a single photo. Play along with what your phone’s camera offer and take the best shots ever.

Edit

The final touch of photography is to edit. Editing your photos will give you the sharpness and beauty of the photo taken. Adding small adjustments to your photos will give it the professional look you yearn for.

You can use photo editing software’s like Lightroom or adobe photoshop to edit your pictures to give it the professional look. Better still, there are a lot of android apps on the store that offers editing services to photos. Play around with the images in the software or editing apps to your satisfactory.

Conclusion

Smartphone photography has taken over digital photography in recent times due to the advanced camera’s being attached to the mobile innovations of our time.

It being compact, and always available to us everywhere at anytime, people easily pick their smartphones and take photographs at any type of event or state.

In this articles, I have provided six tips you can follow to have good smartphone photography.

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