Basic tricks to take good pictures with mobile phones is exploiting the features by knowing the limitations of a typical mobile phone camera. This is the continuation of the previous article How to Take Good Pictures with Mobile Phones by Knowing the Limits. So, this is the last and final part of the whole way to successfully use your mobile phone camera, from photographic point of view. When photographing with an SLR, a mirrorless camera, a bridge or a compact point and shoot camera with some manual controls, each photo will require some preparation. You have to think about the focus, ISO, exposure time, openness, focal length etc. With the cell phone that is impossible. Certainly this is a limitation, because you are not allowed, in any given situation, to take all kinds of photos you want. On the other hand, however, you can also see it as an advantage – we said these before in short at the end of that article.
Basic Tricks To Take Good Pictures : Give Attention to the Background
You are shooting with your phone. So, always take into account the rule of thirds and the other things we wrote – browse through the whole Digital Photography section or do a search on our website using the search function. Give importance to the previous article’s list of weak points.
Cell phones tend to have the opening blocked at very high values. This fact, combined with the reduced focal length, makes the fact that you will always have the background and the subject in focus. So, forget the blurry (another reason why the close-up portraits are not for smartphones) backgrounds, you can get but it will be very slight. But above all, even more, our recommendation is to focus on the background. Backgrounds often contain distracting elements that can ruin a photo. The focal length tends towards a wide field angle, which leads to include even more things in the frame. Therefore always review the scene carefully before shooting. If the background is too busy or simply contains a single distracting element, seeks to change the point of view.
Again, because of the quality of depth of field, with the cell phone comes in handy for minimalism in the composition. Therefore consider very simple scenes, in which the subject stands out against a clean background. Complex scenes, with many things, they can still be good, but there are many more variables to be controlled in order to obtain a good result.
Basic Tricks To Take Good Pictures : Manage the light in the picture
Try to take advantage of the golden hour, the scattered light and shade in the days of the overcast sky. Also, learn to recognize the reading of exposure. Take reasonable care of the scenes those are to be taken on overly contrasted place. The sensors of the phones have a smaller dynamic range than many cameras. This means that they can not record all the difference in brightness between the illuminated areas and shadows. If a scene is too contrasty, the dark shadows and areas of high brightness creates issues.
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Think, for example of a sunny day at outdoors, at noon, a scene that is strongly opposing. In a situation of this type, a cell phone will do one of two things :
- Get a sky which is totally burned (white) and the ground relatively well exposed or
- Make objects on the ground very dark and the sky well exposed.
You have two solutions : avoid scenes like this, or if you want a photo at all costs exposure balanced, you can make the best of a bad situation and decide which part of the scene you want properly exposed, while neglecting the other. In this second case, you have several ways to make it less “heavy”. First, at the time of the shooting, make sure to reduce the portion of the frame it occupies or, you can intervene in post-production, converting the image to black and white. In this case the absence of color of overexposed or underexposed areas is seconded by monochromaticity. Still, in other cases these areas can act as negative space to give more emphasis to the main subject.
We are unable to control virtually all aspects of exposure, still at least one thing is allowed by all mobile phones. Even the camera based applications will support it – they always have the exposure compensation control. So, you can always underexpose or overexpose the photo if the auto exposure does not satisfy you. The luck is that if you can evaluate the result directly on the screen on LCD screen, even before shooting.
Points to Avoid To Take Good Pictures with Mobile Phones
One of the qualitative aspects in which the phones are absolutely further back is the management of low-light scenes. You may have noticed that photographing at night with the phone, indoors or at night, often the pictures goes grainy. It is the fault of excessive noise that you get when you raise the ISO. Here are tips to save a little in these situations :
- Hold it in a firm grip, by holding the phone with both hands and pushing your elbows against your body, prevents blur.
- Exclude the flash, which flattens the shadows and makes the colors are washed out
- Download an application that stabilizes the photos.
- Try to photograph in the presence of a strong light source, for example, near a lamp or a window.
Try to avoid zooming with your mobile. The lens is fixed, so there is no real zoom. Instead, what you do is simply crop the image. So you find yourself simply with a lower resolution file.
