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Mobile Pictures – 3 Tips For Taking Better Pictures With Your Mobile Phone

Natalie Ediger, August 17, 2017· Digital Learning

Intro:

To take your social media content to the next level, I’ve put together some useful tips to help you make better mobile phone pictures. To get rid of the obvious things in advance, here are two tips:  Use your home screen shortcut to be ready to shoot your photos as soon as possible. When we’re ready to shoot, it makes sense to use the volume buttons on your Iphone to take photos, depending on the situation. For example, if you only have one hand free to shoot.

Why?

As a photographer it is basically about capturing interesting light. With the right light your photo stands and falls, I will not talk in this article about how you can use artificial light but would like to encourage you to actively perceive the light of the sun around you more attentively. The morning and evening hours are best suited for this. During noon the sun is too steep and therefore the light is too hard.

Just like that:

So why would you take cell phone pictures? Now I see several reasons which speak for it. You always have it with you and nowadays these things have such good cameras built in that some professional photographers get scared. Another reason is that a mobile phone camera is reduced to a minimum. You have only minimal possibilities concerning the settings and most of it is controlled directly by the camera. So it depends strongly on the composition when you take photos with your mobile phone. You can only put limited focus on a certain part of the picture mostly the whole picture is in focus. Here are a few examples where the picture depends strongly on the composition of the picture.

You can’t hide behind the Super Lens with your mobile phone which allows you to reach deep blurred depths. Here is another example of what I did with my SLR camera:

As you can see, the background becomes blurred and therefore much less important. So and now after all that wishy-washy talk from the beginning I don’t want to keep you on the torture: Here are my tips for perfect mobile phone pictures!

Concrete tips:

Rule of thirds

The Rule of Thirds is one of the first rules that photographers are taught in courses. It is about dividing the picture into 9 parts. It looks like this:

The rule says that you should not place your subjects or points of interest in the middle of the picture, but place them on the outer lines. You may be wondering why this is good, but there have been studies that have shown that humans tend to move to one of the upper or lower points rather than stare directly at the center. So this helps the viewer to a natural processing.

Use light (use back light, Flair)

When making a portrait of something you should always make sure you have the light in your back otherwise the face of your subject will turn black. This may make sense for a portrait, but I think it can also be used as a stylistic device. And if you are lucky, there is even a so-called flair in your picture.

The light of the sun in this picture comes very strongly from the front and gives the whole a golden shimmer.

Negative Space

I like pictures which are very simple and very good and I think that this is a good starting point to get to first compositions. The strength lies in the simplicity!

The largest part of this picture consists of sky and some clouds and a very small part consists of seagull. The advantage of so much negative space is that the image is clear very quickly. The negative space helps to put the focus in this sense.

Outro:

I hope you can do something with my tips and my pictures serve you as inspiration. Photography for me depends strongly on my own style and my own sense of aesthetics. Therefore I find it very important to find your own style and to cultivate it. I can’t say for myself what my style is but to write such articles and to carry my pictures to the outside help me to define my style extremely.

So, that’s it from my side now I wish you a lot of fun catching the light!

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