Tara Singh
I shoot with my real camera for most of my serious work, but for everyday travel I rely on my phone. It’s an aid for non-photographers traveling that I can help improve their use of their phone to take many quality photographs. I found 8 key techniques that bring the biggest change in quality, all of them that in some way to improve your photos without spending a dime and which all require you to slow down a moment or two before snapping the shot.
For most travel photographs taken with your phone the biggest single factor is the light. Harsh light is the worst enemy for your phones camera, and the amount of harsh light increases as the day gets brighter. If you have time for an early morning walk (about an hour after sunrise) and/or an evening stroll (about an hour before sunset) then all your travel photographs will be far better than those shot at other times. For your afternoon adventures you may as well just leave your camera at home.
Shooting from below. Most of us shoot photos from eye level and that’s the default for our phone too, but that’s rarely the best angle. By crouching down and shooting up at your subject, you create a much more dramatic and interesting composition and also remove all the mess of the foreground of the street that usually fills up the bottom third of our photos. Try dropping down to a knee before taking the shot and see if it doesn’t make for a better photo.
Tap to set the focus, then adjust the exposure using your finger. Auto exposure on a modern phone is generally perfectly fine for ‘snapping’ photos, but is not always the best for the photo you actually shot. Tap the main point of interest in your shot, then slide your finger down a little to decrease the exposure by about 1/4 stop. This will help to keep highlight detail in very light parts of the image such as the sky and very bright surfaces.
Try the rule of thirds. Rather than centering your subject within the frame, place their eye at one of the four intersections created by the lines that divide the screen into three equal parts vertically and horizontally. Use the grid option in the camera’s settings to make these lines appear on the screen. As soon as you start to apply this rule to your travel photos you will immediately notice an improvement.
Be certain to include the foreground in your photos in order to provide them with depth. Often, photos taken with phones are so flat that they look like they were painted. Include a leaf, a doorway, your hand, a fence in the lower third of the image. Ask yourself before taking the photo, what is in the foreground? If the answer to this could be nothing, which would mean you need to reframe your shot.
Capture 3 versions of a scene. This is somewhere in between the method used by professionals, i.e. to shoot many photos, and that of most amateurs, i.e. to capture one then walk off. A wide shot, a medium shot centered on the main subject and a close up-close and detailed shot of a particular aspect of the scene are, in my experience, 3 of the better shots that will be captured of any scene. If all 3 are not captured then, for many, the single shot captured will be of very poor quality.
Edit your images lightly to develop them to their full potential. Crop an image to better develop the composition. Increase the amount of detail in the shadows to reveal information in dark sections of the image. Lower the highlights to reveal detail in very bright parts of the images. Add slight contrast and very slight saturation to images shot in certain light. This type of editing is invisible. Other people will never know you have edited the images; they will only know that you have taken great images.
Clean the lens. The single most under-appreciated technique for improving photographs in travel. I make sure to keep a microfiber cleaning cloth with me, and give the front and back of the lens a quick rub before every shot. The impact of keeping a clean lens on photograph quality is enormous. In particular it makes a huge difference on bright days when the lens is prone to smudging and it really shows up in photos shot with the iPhone.
Here are two more habits for you to build: 1) Slow Down. In order to become a more competent photographer, especially with your smart phone, you have to pause for a few seconds to assess where everything is in relation to your focal point. Look at the photo from all four corners. What are the lines of the photo going to be? Where is the dominant line going? Is the lighting balanced? Is there adequate foreground to produce depth in the photo? (Remember the rule of thirds – not center of the photo). You’ll be surprised at how many poorly shot photos you take while you’re traveling because you haven’t paused long enough to think about what a better photo would look like. Simply take 5 seconds to survey the scene before you snap the shutter. This simple pause will elevate the quality of your photographs dramatically. Review and Delete. The majority of photos taken by travelers are bad photos. I mean very bad. However, most travelers keep all of their photos from a trip. All of them. Instead, we recommend that you delete a huge portion of the photos that you’ve taken. By doing so, you’re going to be left with about 50 photos that are truly superior to the rest of the photos that you took. And the simple act of deleting the majority of photos will make the better photos stand out in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t.
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