Philip Gabriel Photography Blog

5 Must-Know Photography Tips For Taking Pictures With Your Smartphone!

Posted on August 27th, 2015 in Products & Services, Studio Life by Gabe Fredericks

Everyone has heard the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

If the pictures is not taken properly though, those words could be forever lost in a mess of poor lighting, blurred images, and a moment in time recorded only in your memory. : )

Believe it or not, you have a great camera with you all the time – your phone!

To take the best pictures, especially outdoors in sunny weather, keep these tips from Philip Gabriel Photography in mind!

I took a few photos of my children with my iPhone – you’ll see what I mean:

1. Use The Sun

Natural light from sun allows you to be creative with photos, even ones you take on your smartphone!

With the fall approaching quickly, don’t miss a beat – take your kids outside for a colorful background. The best place to position them is between you and the sun.

Not only will you avoid squinting but it will create a beautiful rim light around their heads!

2. Consider A Dark Background

What do we mean by “dark”? Try to avoid using the open sky or grass as your background.

When you’re snapping pictures on your phone, use a tree line or a structure as the backdrop. This also helps to make the rim light visible.

But how do you get the tree line in your picture? That leads us to our next tip…

3. Get Low!

When you’re looking down at your kids taking a picture, you will most likely get a grassy background that is super bright. Boring! : )

When you move down to their level, you really get to see the picture from their perspective. That’s much more interesting and it also allows you to get the tree line in the background and see that awesome rim light.

I took two pictures on my iPhone (below) to show the difference between taking a picture from above and one from their level. Notice the difference?

You can also see that from getting lower to the ground, it makes distracting elements less noticeable such as the road, chain-link fence, and cars driving by.

(photo taken on an iPhone)

(photo above taken on an iPhone)

(photo above by Philip Gabriel Photography)

4. Manually Expose

A super important feature on your phone is the exposure.

When capturing an image, you can make it more dynamic by tapping on the person you’re taking a photo of on the screen. This will tell your phone where it needs to manually expose. Where you click will become the brightest part of your photo. Without it, the picture could end up way too dark.

On an iPhone, if you tap and hold that spot, the exposure will be locked on your child (or other object).

5. Zoom In!

Zooming in on your kids in the picture will make the picture more interesting.

To zoom, touch the screen with two fingers, and with your fingers on the screen, spread them apart. You can then touch the screen with one finger to move the image around to adjust cropping.

If you have a lot of background, it takes the focus away from your kids and it’s much harder to see them!

Zooming in will allow for better exposure as well as help your camera to retain the sharpness of the image!

In this picture you can see that when I zoomed in, my kids filled up more of the photo and the exposure was better.