Last week I wrote a post on how to photograph your children with your phone giving a few general guidelines to follow and some nice tips to try with the iPhone. The post has been super popular. Thanks for the interest, I had some nice feedback and I really hope you started practising some of them.
This week I want to give you a very BIG tip for your iPhone. As I said in the previous post I can’t really help with other phone brands but they probably have similar features, so maybe study your phone or search the web.
So are you ready for better phone photography?
This is what I really use all the time!
I want to go back to tip n.3 which was tap on the subject you want to focus before taking the picture. Okay sometimes is not necessary. You want to take a photo of a nice landscape or a sunset or a quick snap of your baby and you just click. We all do that.
But next time try to tap on the subject and you’ll see a square appearing on the screen. Try right now while you are reading and you can test it straight away. If you click on a darker area of what you are looking at you will have a different result than clicking on a brighter area, right?
I am sitting on my table at the moment and I am taking a quick snap of a candle in front of a window. The one below is a screenshot of the camera while taking just a snap with any touching/focusing, a pretty crappy one, right? But this is what most people photograph most of the time, no focus, no light . . .
Then I tap on the candle to focus on it and got it a bit closer, this was what it looked like. You see the yellow square right?
If you compare the 2 photos the last doesn’t look that bad. Okay, you might notice it’s a little bit brighter because I had a white paper on the left side on the candle but it’s still dark-ish.
So here is the super BIG tip!
On the side of the square, there is a little sun. If you click and drag your finger up the image will be brighter, if you drag it down it will be darker. Pretty cool right? So because the candle was dark I slide it up a bit and I had this picture.
This is pretty good now, a big improvement from the simple snap don’t you think? Maybe a better angle would be more appealing but it was a test to show you how it works. This is simply done with the phone, no fancy app just a little trick 😉
If I had to take a photo of this candle, I would probably go for a detail and a higher angle to make it more interesting. Then retouch it a little, I only added a bit of sharpening and some shadow, nothing more!
So what do you think? Pretty fun hey?
You can do the same the exact same thing with your children. Play with the exposure of the photo, try different angles and have fun 🙂
Here below a few pictures of my daughter I took with the phone. Yes I enhanced them in Instagram but I do use the exposure slider every day and if you start using it you can see the difference in your pictures.
Have a great weekend moms (and dads)!!
If you have an Android you can check this article to lock the focus
Vale xx
