Everyone may think you need a laptop or a nice expensive camera in order to make and edit photos and videos. Sure, it’ll help but the most powerful tool is the one in your pocket: your phone. Most phones today have great camera quality. For the purpose of this article, I will be focusing on iPhones, but these tips may apply to other phones too.
If you want to take better photos, there are plenty of easy tips that’ll help your pictures look more professional. This may sound stupid but cleaning off the lens is the first step. The lens can get dirty very easily from dirt or make-up that gets built up.
Next, setting the exposure and choosing where to focus. On the iPhone camera, you can click on your target to set the focus and when doing so, a yellow box will appear and you can change the exposure. Exposure is the amount of light on an image. If an image is brighter, the higher the exposure is. You may have to play around with it depending on where you are but it’ll help.
This one is pretty obvious but I just wanted to mention it in case, do NOT use the zoom feature. It makes your images blurrier making the quality worse.
One thing you can do to make your images more unique is to shoot from different perspectives. Shoot where no one else is shooting. Another thing to do is to shoot with the rule of thirds in mind. The rule of thirds is a technique used where the photographer shoots with nine squares, three rows and three columns. Many new photographers tend to shoot with the subject in the center, the rule of thirds however allows you to shoot more on the side.
Another thing that people tend to do is shoot with a distracting background making images more cluttered. A tip is if you’re shooting outside, to shoot from a lower angle having the sky be your background.
Using leading lines in your photos can make them more professional, for example, if you’re shooting in Milwaukee where there are buildings, angle the camera so it’s perfectly balanced to the buildings.
Getting a good moving shot with a phone can be hard and sometimes it’s best to get a third-party app. You can get a slow shutter app, it drops the speed down when taking the picture, allowing you to get that perfect moving shot.
Don’t rely on photo editing to make your picture better, so if you use a bad picture and edit that, it’s most likely still going to be a bad picture. Getting the right image can take time, just experiment with your phone from different lightings and angles and you’ll eventually get the shot you love.
