Phone Photography
“A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.”
I wanted to check in with you. How is being at home? I wanted to give you some camera tips. These are just a couple that I could think of so if I didn’t cover something that you would love me to cover just drop it in the comment section below. The first couple of tips are for whatever camera type you have and then I will give some specific tips for phones. The phone tips will specific to iPhones but they might apply for other phones as well.
Photography is a visual way to tell a story. So before taking a photo ask yourself what is the story you are trying to tell. What is the subject of your photo? If it is a person then it’s pretty obvious but if your walking outside and talking a landscape it might not be as obvious. What about what you are seeing in front of you is wanting you to take a picture. Two basic rules of photography that I would love to go over and they are the rule of thirds and leading lines.
What is the rule of the thirds you ask? If you look at the photo above you can see a grid from an iPhone that will help with the rule of thirds. The rule of the thirds is putting the subject in the right/left and top/bottom and it helps not putting the subject directly in the center.
Leading lines is using a road, ledge or any kind of straight edge to help the eyes toward your subject. You can use more than one leading lines to do that. I have included one above and below.
I want to talk about phone photography. Most of us have a smart phone that will allow us to take photos. I’m going to give directions to how to put them on a iPhone because that’s what I have but I’m sure you can do it on any phone. If you would like help figuring out how to do it on your device just let me know what kind you have and I would love to try to help you in the best way that I can.
I would suggest turning on the grid because it will help you with the rule of the thirds. You can see an example of what it would like with the photo above. To turn it on go to settings and scroll down to camera and click on it. You will see a switch for grid and just click on it and when you open your camera back up it will appear.
I would suggest turning off flash because the flash on your phone doesn’t work quite well and they can be more of a distraction then anything. If your using it on a person it ends up just hurting their eyes(I did a selfie with mine and saw spots afterwards) and making their skin look over exposed. If you're trying to use your phone in a low light situation I would using a flash light or someone else flashlight on their phone to help bring in some extra light. You can turn the flash off of the iPhone in the camera itself. It is on the top left corner when you have the camera open and it is a lighting bolt.
I would suggest turning on HDR(High Dynamic Range). It helps bring in more color into your photos. I know for my phone(iPhone 8) I can turn/off the HDR when I have my camera up. It’s on top left next to the flash and it’s just the letters HDR.
When you want to focus on on a particular item on an iPhone just touch the screen on the item you want to focus on and the phone will focus on it. You can change the exposure(the amount of light that is let in the lens) when you focus. When you focus you will see a box. On either the right or left side of the box(usually the right side) you will see a sun. If you click on the sun and drag up or down you can see the exposure change. I made a short video of how to do it(included above).
You can do a burst for when there is a lot of action happening which you can do by just holding down the shutter button. When you got to look at the photos it will show them as one photo but if you click edit on the top right corner it will show them all. You can pick from there which one you like. Burst is good for group shots to make sure everyone looks good, photographing kids moving and sports. You can also take photos(including bursts) by holding down the volume buttons on the side.
One can have the GPS turned on so you can remember where you took photos. If you would like to keep that private you can also have it turned off. To switch it either way to go settings and scroll down where you see privacy. Once you have entered the privacy zone, go to where it says location and scroll down to camera. You can then change it ti what ever setting you would like.
Using Self-timer(which can be found in the camera and it is the second icon from the right) can be fun for group shots or shots where you don’t want it to look like a selfie. It can also come in handy if you don’t want as much camera shake.
