How to take better photos with your phone

Tips to get amazing photos using just your phone

Forgot your camera? Here’s how to get great photos with your phone!

In this tutorial, Sean Tucker shares his tips for taking great photos just using your phone camera and the adjustments you can make to the settings.

How to take better photos with your phone – follow these tips!

Why use your phone camera?

People love good photos and don’t care what camera it was taken on.

Use your phone for your day-to-day photography and help you develop your ‘photographers eye’.

Don’t use the excuse that you don’t have a real camera to not take photos as a photographer! 

Do phone cameras have limitations? Absolutely. But phone cameras have come a long way and are a great tool for photos in a pinch.

The limitations of the phone camera will help you get better at composition because you don’t have any gear to hide behind. You will have to look hard at the light, lines, and elements of the composition to get a great photo.

Some famous photographers like Julian Calverley @jccalverly have made their careers using iPhone photos only, like the photos below:

How to take better phone photos Tip #1: Choose the highest resolution lens

If you have a phone with multiple camera and lens settings, look up the specs so you know what you can customise. 

If you’re able to, choose to use the lens with the highest resolution.

Be aware that zoom can lose resolution. If it’s using optical zoom then it’s ok but most pinch to zoom is just cropping down and removing information. 

Try moving closer to the subject instead of zooming if the photo loses quality.

In the screenshot below, you can see the image looks grainy and not great quality when using the finger pinch zoom:

How to take better phone photos Tip #2: Shoot in raw

Shooting in raw means you will get more information in the image file when editing the photo.

In the phone camera settings, you can select raw as the image file type. Raw files are uncompressed and unprocessed files which means the image has all of the visual information seen in the scene without any touching up.

This enables the camera to capture all of the light, color, and other visual information so you can use it in editing later. 

In this screenshot, the iPhone settings allow the user to turn on raw as the image file type:

How to take better phone photos Tip #3: Turn on Pro mode if using a downloaded camera app

If you want to take photos with more options than the basic camera app, you can download other camera apps onto your phone.

The pro mode in some camera apps will give you more control over the settings. This allows you more adjustments over things like exposure and white balance.

If you don’t want to use pro or just want to use your camera app, you should still be able to slightly adjust exposure and contrast settings before taking the photo. 

How to take better phone photos Tip #4: Turn off the automatic assist   

There are limitations with phone cameras like shallow depth of field, ghosting, and small sensors.

It’s better to turn off the automatic background blur, sharpening, scene detection and any other assist settings. 

The HDR (high dynamic range) is great for beginners and everyday users, but if you turn it off you will have a more raw photo to edit later.

By turning off these assisting settings, you’ll get a more raw photo and be able to develop your eye to understand composition and how to adjust those settings yourself.

Take better pictures with your phone by following these tips

Anywhere you find yourself with your phone, you can take incredible pictures! Don’t miss any photo opportunity as long as you have your phone on hand.

Improve your own photography skills with this comprehensive photography guide for beginners!

Which of these phone photography tips will you use THIS WEEK?

Comment below!