How to take better pictures with your smartphone
One of the top functions of a modern smartphone has to be its camera. We love to hear just how many megapixels our mobiles have and Samsung, Sony, HTC and friends love to tell us too. But just because you’ve got a 13MP camera in your pocket, that doesn’t mean you know how to use it. That’s where we come in. Welcome to our guide of taking better pictures with your smartphone. The good news is that you don’t need to know anything about photography to take great snaps or understand this guide either.
We guarantee that by the end of this gallery, you’ll be capturing better photos from your camera phone than you ever have before. Prepare to be enlightened and get those fingers ready.
Buy a good smartphone with a good camera
Some phones have better cameras than others. That’s just the way it is. Nokia and Apple, for example, spend a lot of time, expense, effort and research into making sure that the imaging credentials of their phones are top notch. They get the best lenses, the best sensors and the best trickery to make sure that your snaps are everything you want them to be. The Nokia Lumia 920 or the Nokia 808 are good, as are the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z, as well as the iPhone 5, of course. There are plenty of other good – and less premium – ones out there too. Unfortunately, as a general rule, the more megapixels, the more a company has probably invested in its mobile phone camera. Megapixels on their own, however, do not make a camera good.
Know what you can shoot, and what you can’t…
There’s two very important limitations to recognise about the camera on your phone before you even think about taking a photo. The first is that there’s no optical zoom. There’s probably digital zoom but that’s not the same. Without optical zoom, the only way that you can make the objects in your picture appear larger than they are is by walking over to stand closer to them before taking your shot. The second point to recognise is that you’ve got a wide-angle lens through which to capture the world. It means that your camera can fit as many objects into the frame as possible. If it had a normal lens, then it would be hard to get pictures of people at close distances.
The flip side of that is that scenery in the background – which may include, say, buildings that you’re trying to take a picture of – are made to look even further away and smaller than they actually are. So, what does all that mean? Well, you’ll need to stand a lot closer to big objects thank you might think in order to capture them. It also makes it fairly pointless trying to shoot subjects that are a long way away. For example, there’s no way you’re going to get a decent snap of your favourite band at a concert unless you happen to be in the first few rows. The golden rule is to trust what you see on your screen not what you see with your eyes. If it doesn’t look good on your smartphone, then it’s not going to look good as a picture.
Max out your picture quality
Some camera phones come with the strange impression that we’d rather save memory space than take the best looking photos we can. Head into your mobile’s camera settings to make sure that’s not the case. Check that the resolution – measured in megapixels or as pixel dimensions – is at the highest available level. Essentially, just choose the biggest numbers. The other option you’re looking for will be called something like Image Quality. You don’t want Normal, you don’t want Fine, you want Superfine or however the one at the top of the menu is named. In general, the higher the resolution and the better the image quality, the more flexibility that will give you to get the picture that you’re after.
Turn off the flash
Flash is something that you should only use when you really, really have to. Big external flashes on DSLR cameras are the only ones you should be using at all if you can help it. The little LED light next to the lens on your phone is just about the poorest kind of flash around and is only worth using if you simply can’t get a photo without it. Your camera phone will want to use the flash whenever it thinks it’s too dark. The trouble is that an LED flash just makes your subjects look the wrong colour and not how you enjoy them with the naked eye. Everything in the foreground – plants, friends’ faces, the back of someone’s head at a concert – will all look completely blown out while anything more than a metre or two away will be cloaked in darkness. The idea behind the flash is that it provides enough light to take a shot quickly. The longer a shot takes, the more likely you are to get a blurred image. So, our advice is to always start with the flash off. If the results look grainy or smeared, then it’s time to fire up the LED.
Clean your lens
Whether made of glass or plastic, the camera lens on your smartphone could do with a clean. Why? Well, because it spends a lot of time face down rubbing up against all sorts of surfaces – tables, the inside of pockets, your fingers, you name it – and doing so picks up a lot of smears. Those smears will have an effect on your pictures if you don’t do anything about it. Colours might not look right, lines will be blurred, sharpness lost and all because you didn’t take the time to give it a wipe. Any sort of soft material will do. Ideally it would be a lens cloth but your t-shirt will probably be fine.
Turn up the ISO when needed
This is not something that you should do as a matter of course and it’s not something that you have the option to play with on every phone, but assigning a higher ISO number – you’ll find the menu if you’ve got it – is one thing you can do before resorting to the flash. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive your smartphone will be to light and so the more likely you will be to capture a clean shot in darker conditions. The downside to raising the ISO is that you start to lose image quality as a graininess begins to creep into your photos. So, the message here is to keep your ISO low unless you need to. If you don’t want to think about it at all, then leave it in Auto.
Hold still
We all know how camera phones love to take an age between pressing the shutter release button and actually taking the snap. They think, they focus, they beep, they might turn green and, eventually, in their on sweet time, they’ll finally capture an image. That can take a second or two – even longer if you’re in low light – and it’s your job to stay as still as you can throughout. If you move, you’ll probably end up with a nice, big blur instead of what you wanted. So, find a steady position, hold your phone with two hands if you can, legs firmly planted, arms tucked in and hold still until it’s done. It might also be wise to tell your subject not to move either until you say it’s ok.
Touch to focus
Not all camera phones have this option but it’s something that’s certainly possible on most touchscreen smartphones. Touch to focus is the ability to touch the object on your viewscreen that you would like to be in focus. Your phone will then lock in on that point and usually turn green and bleep to let you know. There’s two reasons why that is useful. The first is that it ensures it ends up taking the picture your way and not by choosing to make something else the focus of your snap. The second positive outcome is that, because the job of focusing has already been done, it cuts down on the shutter lag between you pressing fire and the image getting taken. In other words, you’ve just reduced your chance of a blurry photo.
+/- means Exposure Control – use it!
Exposure control is an absolute must whether you’re using a compact, a DSLR or a smartphone. It’s a way of making the picture look a bit lighter or a bit darker. You usually getting four notches to play with on a mobile phone – two on the plus side and two on the minus side – and you can see the effect that they have, even before you’ve taken your photo, as you start to play with them. The reason you’ll need to use exposure control is because your camera is not a genius. It has a guess at what you’re trying to take a picture of and adjusts the brightness accordingly. The trouble is that it very often gets it wrong. That’s when you go manual and change the setting yourself. Hey presto, all your really dark snaps now look normal again and you can calm down the blindingly over-exposed ones too. Easy.
Scene modes are important
Scene modes are something that we’re beginning to slowly forget about in compact cameras. The cameras themselves aren’t forgetting about them, though. On the contrary; they’re getting so smart that they’re thinking about them for us. The trouble is that that’s not the case with camera phones. As we’ve said already, your mobile phone camera is not a genius and it doesn’t always understand what kind of picture you’re trying to take. Scene modes are a way of giving it some guidelines. There’s no need to use them all the time but, if your device doesn’t give you the photo you want, it’s worth taking a look to see if it knows an appropriate scene mode that might help give it a clue.
Beware of tinted screens
Another word on colour: some phones have screens that are ever so slightly colour tinted. Yes, Samsung, we’re talking about you. The result is that, while your photos might look fantastic on your device, once viewing on a laptop or printed out they might not look the same. In the case of Samsung phones, everything looks a lot bluer than it actually is. What you might then find is that your fantastic sapphire sky blues look a lot more washed out in reality. Get to know your phone screen first and then you’ll be able to adjust accordingly when you take your shots.
Use camera apps like Instagram
There are all sorts of apps on Android, iOS and Windows Phone that help add functionality to your mobile phone camera but the ones that make your photos as good as they can be are those that allow you to add filter effects, boost colours and vignette (blur in an artistic manner). You might be a bit sick of seeing everyone else’s Instagram, Snapseed, Hipstamatic and EyeEm efforts all over your Facebook feed but they do look great and it’s utterly addictive. Give them a whirl. They can turn even the poorest of pictures into aesthetic perfection.
Experiment
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Now that you know how some of this works, it’s time to forget it all and start making up your own rules. Experiment with photography. Have fun. Some things that you don’t think will work will actually look great on camera while others that you’re sure will be stunners turn out to be flops. That’s just the way of it. Muck around with different kinds of framing. Take super close up shots or snaps from very low angles. Tilt the camera. Spin it round. It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that you’ll know how to tweak what you want with the suggestions we’ve made in this article. Once you’ve got an idea, don’t give up until you’ve forced your smartphone into taking the picture your way. Enjoy, and happy snapping.
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