With the recent launch of the iPhone 11 and an abundance of other great camera phones on the market, combined with the age-old saying that there’s no better camera than the one you have in your pocket, this week I’m going to lay down some phone photography tips.
I’m Dave Williams, and every week I’m here on ScottKelby.com for #TravelTuesday—let’s do this!
Firstly, our phone is often the closest camera to hand when a moment arises out of nowhere that we want to put into pixels, and to this end, it can be a great benefit to be able to launch the camera app as quickly as possible. Get yourself familiar with the quickest way to launch your camera app with any shortcuts your phone offers, and if you enjoy using the camera built into Lightroom Mobile there’s an easy way access it through the iOS notification centre.
Next up, remember that everything we know about photography still applies when we use our phones. Rules of composition, selective focussing, burst shooting, and bracketing for HDR exposures can all be applied, and in fact, should be applied to give us the best results and the best mobile photos possible. Just like quickly launching our camera app, it’s important to become acquainted with the methods to apply these techniques to our photography. There are compositional overlays, we can adjust for focus and exposure, we can apply HDR, and we can shoot burst mode. Everything we know still applies, so we should make the most of what our smartphones offer us for the absolute best photos.
After we’ve captured the scene, we have a whole wealth of post-processing apps available to us. If you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud member, there’s Lightroom Mobile, and other apps are available which also deliver top-quality results, such as Snapseed, VSCO, LensDistortion, and of course, the editing features native to our phones operating systems. For example, as well as making final adjustments to our images, if we’re iPhone users, we can select a photo from our camera roll, swipe up, and then if we shot a Live Photo we can process our photo sequence into a long exposure—perfect for when we’d shoot waterfalls!
Take the time to learn your way around your camera phone and you’ll be surprised at what you can do with it!
I’ll be posting shots from my phone to my Instagram Story starting on Friday when I arrive in Iceland, so make sure you follow along right here.
Much love
Dave
