One of my favorite sayings is “The best camera is the one you have”.
In today’s age of amazing technology just about everyone has a smartphone with a pretty amazing camera. I have a professional full frame camera that I use for clients and for my family. But, when I don’t feel like lugging it around town, (you know… to Target or the park), I still feel confident in my ability to get more than a ‘snapshot’. Don’t let that turn you off. A snapshot that is not perfect is still better than no photo and sometimes those turn out to be our favorites! Now, I definitely break out my ‘big camera’ quite often, but I love the convenience of having my phone in my back pocket ready at a moment’s notice. Here are some quick tips and tricks to get great looking images right from your smart phone.
- Be aware of your surroundings. This is true with any photography and something I stress when teaching photo classes. Look around you. If there is a basket of laundry behind your cutie eating their snack, just quickly push it out of the way. You will notice a big difference in composition.
- Try a different angle. Instead of just snapping a photo of your little one head on, move around. Try taking your photo from above or to the side.
- Keep your lens clean. Simple as that! Take a second to wipe the little fingerprints off the lens before snapping away.
- Avoid flash. One downside to camera phones is the flashes leave your subject a wonky color. In low light situations, phones are not the best. However, if you want to remember a moment-it’s better to have a poor flash photo than none at all!
- Get in close. It’s better to take a step forward than to zoom in on your subject.
- Same goes for cropping. You’d rather frame your image the way you’d like from the beginning rather than cropping it later (when you will lose some quality)
- Take photos in the moment rather than worrying about posing. After all, almost always, the best pictures are the ones that aren’t posed.
- Edit your photos rather than adding a filter. My favorite editing app for my iphone is PicTapGo. I LOVE this one. You can do all sorts of different things with it. Another I really like is FX photo studio. There are endless options, so just mess around with a few apps to see what you like best.
- PRINT YOUR PHOTOS! Seriously folks! Posting your babes on social media is great, but not nearly as great as having those pictures in hand. I can not say enough about the Chatbooks app which prints little books straight from your phone with almost zero effort on your part. The books are only $8 each and are 60 pages. They print automatically after you have filled the book! It sounds too good to be true. I also use mpix.com (my favorite non pro photo printing service) app to print individual prints (they have tons of other options as well) quickly and easily.
This is just a very simple list of the basics but with practice and experimenting you can take awesome frame worthy photos right from you phone. Plus, you can add as many frills to your phone as you like with lenses for your phone (like the olloclip) and fancy edits. The sky is the limit!
