Phones are usually used for fun snapshots, but the simple camera in your smartphone can also produce highly professional-looking photographs. Here are a few tips.
Know Your Phone
Just as you need to get to know your camera, you also need to learn your phone’s features. We may call it a simple camera, but at the time this article was published, the average smartphone camera already offered a number of useful features. Explore its capabilities and try using the camera at different times.
Take Advantage of Your Camera’s Compact Size
Unlike your regular camera, your phone is almost always with you. That opens up a whole new range of possible subjects. You can take a photograph at any moment. Make the most of that and broaden your photographic horizons.
Use Apps
Many people edit photographs from their regular camera on a computer. Photographs taken with a phone can be edited more quickly and easily with a wide variety of apps.
Around the time this article was published, the Dutch Consumers’ Association compiled a list of useful photo apps. Filters in particular can take your photographs to the next level. In addition to editing features, some apps offer other handy tools. They are worth trying.
Use Social Media
At the time of publication, Instagram was one of the most popular online platforms for phone photography. The social media site made it easy to share your work with a very large audience. It was not only celebrities who built large followings; ordinary people who took beautiful photographs sometimes gained many thousands of followers there as well.
On Instagram or another platform, you naturally share only your best photographs. You can also store the rest of your work in the cloud, for example through Strato.
Apply What You Already Know
You may be capturing images with a different device than usual, but many of the ‘rules’ you follow when using your regular camera also apply to phone photography. Consider composition, the direction of the light and your choice of subject, for example.
You can also find a wide range of books in this site’s Books section with advice on improving your photography.
Do Not Underestimate It
Phone photography may have seemed less professional than photography with a good camera, but it should not be underestimated. At the time, some people in the United States even earned a living by taking photographs with their iPhones.
NRC had also recently reported on photojournalists who had discovered Instagram. The article highlighted several talented photographers who were taking journalism in a new direction.
