Springtime brings blooming flowers, later golden hour light, temperatures for outdoor activities, and breaks and vacations meant for trips worth photographing.
You don’t need a $3,000 camera, fancy lenses, or a textbook of knowledge about exposure rules to capture those moments in frame-worthy shots. The phone in your pocket is more powerful than most people realize. You’ll be able to capture beautiful, creative, and captivating images from your phone with a few simple tips and tricks.
Composition: How to Build a Great Shot
Composition in photography is simply the way the subject is placed inside the shot. There are a few tools to composition that make photos feel satisfying, even if you can’t explain why. Applying one of these principles to your photo could take a photo from good to blue-ribbon winning.
The Rule of Thirds is an off-center composition that aligns your subject along the meeting points of an imaginary 3×3 grid over the photo, which gives your photo a sense of structure. Your phone’s camera app has a native grid overlay to help you line up your subject. Turn it on and place your subject at an intersection point instead of dead center and see if the composition feels more artistic.
Leading Lines in an image create a path that helps guide the eye through the scene you’re capturing. In a landscape picture, roads, fences, rivers, or trails could be used as leading lines that help the viewer see all of the image rather than just the focal point. They can also be used to add depth or dimension to a shot when, without them, the image might feel a little flat. Look for natural leading lines in your scene and compose your image in a way that uses those lines to direct the eye through the photo.
Framing an image uses doorways, tree branches, archways, or other elements to place your subject within a natural border. For example, if a cat is sitting on the back of a couch staring out the window, the window itself could be used as a framing device. Rather than taking a close-up photo of the cat, step back and capture the edges of the window to frame the cat within those edges.
The angle of your camera can change the way the photo feels. To make the subject feel large and imposing, crouch down and shoot upward. To make a subject feel small, angle down or capture the image from above. Photograph people at eye level to capture their most flattering angles. For an even different perspective, turn your phone upside down and shoot from the ground. Getting the lens physically closer to the ground changes perspective dramatically and often removes distracting backgrounds.
Intentionally arranging a photo’s composition can greatly impact your final image. Practice using just one, or combining a few, of these tools and get a feel for what composition you tend to like best for different photo types.
Camera Settings: Take Control of Your Shot
Your phone’s camera is hiding a set of tools that can help you dial in lighting, color, and focus, all of which are features that professionals control manually.
First, put your camera in “RAW” mode. RAW photos are larger files because they capture all of the uncompressed data in the image, giving you more flexibility in editing the file in post-processing without losing image quality.
To make sure your subject is crisp and clear, tap it on the screen to focus the camera on the subject. Tap and hold to lock the focus so your camera doesn’t have to hunt for the subject (and potentially pull the focus away from your subject).
After tapping to focus, you may see a little sun icon; that’s your exposure slider. This slider gives you some manual control of your lighting, which can be used to capture better contrast in an image. Tap and drag the sun up to brighten the photo or down to darken it.
There is one feature that your phone can’t quite compete on with a higher-end DSLR camera and lenses: zoom. On your phone’s smaller body and sensor, the zoom function is most likely a combination of optical and digital zoom (or solely digital zoom on older phones). Optical zoom means the lens is physically moved closer or farther from the subject, whereas digital zoom crops the photo and enlarges a section of the image on the screen. Digitally zooming in can reduce image resolution and quality. When shooting photos on your phone, instead of zooming in, move in closer (if you can) to preserve the image detail.
Shooting Modes: Built for Every Scene
Most modern phones have a set of shooting modes designed for specific scenes. These modes can help you get the most out of your camera quickly and easily.
- Burst: Hold the shutter for rapid-fire shots. Ideal for sports, kids, pets, or any other setting with motion.
- Portrait: Blurs the background to make your subject pop. Works well for people, products, and close-ups of food or flowers.
- Macro: Captures fine texture and small subjects, such as wildflowers, insects, handmade products, or details in food.
- Panorama: Stitches a wide scene together, making it great for landscapes, storefronts, or open interior spaces.
- Night: Activates higher exposure settings that brighten the scene. Great for astrophotography of the moon, stars, or other dark scenes, but make sure the phone is completely still in your hands or mounted on a tripod.
Editing, Uploading, Sharing, and Storing Your Photos
After you’ve shot your photos, you may want to fine-tune them with some post-processing. Editing your images isn’t cheating, and in fact most professionals do it. The goal is to enhance what’s already in the image. There are several apps available on iOS and Android that offer a great selection of editing capabilities, including Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile. Affinity is a free desktop app that offers photo editing capabilities similar to those in Photoshop.
When you’re ready to save and share your images, you’ll want to make sure you do so without losing quality. As we mentioned, the original RAW files will be rather large but are important to keep if you intend to make further edits later. Export the images as JPEGs to share on web and social media.
When backing up or sharing, upload to cloud storage or social apps at full resolution. Many apps compress photos by default, so check settings on Facebook, Instagram, and Google to allow uploads at full quality. Protect your phone’s gallery automatically by enabling iCloud, Google Photos, or OneDrive auto-backup so you never lose your most important memories.
Uploading large photo files, especially RAW images or videos, can take a lot of bandwidth. With a fast, reliable fiber connection from Geneseo Communications, your uploads happen in seconds rather than minutes. Whether you’re backing up a weekend’s worth of shots to the cloud or sharing photos to your socials, a strong internet connection makes the whole process seamless.
Great photography is a skill you build over time. Start simple, shoot often, and trust your eye. Most importantly, remember that art is subjective! You’ll develop your own style with practice. As you build your gallery, Geneseo Communications is here to keep you connected to the moments worth capturing, sharing, and remembering.