You don’t have to have a fancy camera and expensive equipment to take great pictures. Thanks to the ever-improving cameras on smartphones, amateur photographers can capture beautiful pictures by following a few basic tips. Keep reading to learn how to take awesome pictures with your smartphone.
Keep Your Lens Clean
The average person checks their phones 53 times in a single day; that breaks down to about three times an hour in an 18-hour period. If you’re like most people, then your phone is handled a lot and is never too far away. While that’s convenient for capturing great shots when the moment presents itself, it also probably means that your phone, including your lens, is not exactly spotlessly clean.
Unfortunately, if your lens is dirty, the pictures you take will suffer even if spots and smudges aren’t visible. Before you begin taking pictures, give your lens a quick wipe with a lint-free cotton cloth. This will allow you to take clearer, crisper pictures.
Set the Focus
Smartphone cameras have become increasingly intuitive and often do a pretty good job of figuring out the subject of the photo. However, before snapping the shot, it’s a good idea to manually set the focus point to ensure that it’ll be in sharp focus. On most phones, simply tapping on the screen where the subject is in the frame is all you need to do to set the focus.
Set the Exposure
After you’ve ensured that your subject is the focus point, your camera will automatically set the exposure in the shot. However, letting the phone set the exposure (which simply refers to how bright or dark the image is), isn’t always ideal. For example, if you’re snapping a shot of a person who is standing in front of a window that’s letting in a lot of light, the image may be too dark. Most phones have manual exposure tools that let you bump up or dial down the exposure to ensure that your subject is easily visible.
Don’t Zoom
The zoom feature may be convenient to use, but taking advantage of it will reduce the quality of your shot. That’s because it’s a digital zoom, which is simply some in-camera image processing, as opposed to an optical zoom, which you would get with a true zoom lens on a film camera.
If possible, instead of using the zoom feature, get closer to your subject. This will give you a much better shot. Alternately, you could crop the image during the editing process. While you still may lose a little bit in quality, you’ll have more control over how much of the image you want to remove.
Don’t Go Overboard with Editing Apps
There are endless editing apps and programs that can add fun and interesting effects to your photos, and it’s tempting to edit every one of your photos. Unfortunately, no matter how sophisticated the app is, it can’t transform a bad picture into a good one; in fact, you’re more likely to reduce a good photo into an over-processed one.
These days, it’s almost impossible not to take awesome pictures with your smartphone. Love it or hate it, technology is constantly changing the way we do things. It’s even making its way into the art world. That awesome picture you learned how to take can now come to life using Augmented Reality. What will they think of next?
