How to take better holiday photos with your smartphone

5 tips to get the best from your photos with smartphone

Nowadays smartphones are gradually replacing everything: credit/debit cards, watches, GPS devices, computers, radio, TV, cameras and many other devices. As we said cameras are one of them, in fact people takes most of pictures with their smartphones, because is the fastest and handier way. Let not get the wrong idea, phone are the most used, but they still have a long way to reach the quality level of professional cameras such as mirrorless and reflex. However, in the last years the top phones they reached a crazy quality level, replacing for complete the old compact cameras. In fact, a mobile phone fits more comfortably in your pocket, saving us space, and with the latest generation sensors and technology, allows us to have excellent results, without necessarily being a pro. Rather many our coo-worker photographers they often use the smartphone in many handy situations, precisely for the reasons just explained above.

In this article, we will not talk about which smartphone is the best for taking great photos or videos, but how to get the best from our mobile phones and bring home the best result.

1 Perspective

Life is all about perspective, seeing differently from others, makes you noticeable in the crowds.  Think about, many people will take tons of photos from same angle, resulting boring and repetitive. While changing your point of view make your photos different and then more visible to people’ eyes. Experimentation is a good key; remember even if a subject is beautiful, watching over time from the same perspective became ordinary. However, when you changing point of view, so you dare to experiment, our eyes will start to notice new details and then our brain start to pay more attention.

It is also true that the more photos we take, the more our eye over time acquires the instinct for more performing shots. However, this means, especially at the beginning, that we will waste a lot of time taking hundreds of shots to keep just few photos really worth. Waste in the execution, but also for discarding the photos we do not like, not mentioning the moment we lost for being too busy capturing.

Start to be more creative, take first a few more seconds to study the environment well, try the angle you think is the best and then click. While it may seems that took us too much time, in reality we saved much more.

2 Options

If you are in hurry, do not use options casually, the result will be not as you expected. Classic example, photographers do not recommend taking pictures with the optical zoom; the reason is that we will reduced the quality of our photo. When you shoot with zoom, especially without steady tripod, the picture will be probaly grainy or blurry. If you need a closer image just walk towards your subject, if you cannot, then better you crop the image or buy lens for smartphone. Never heard it? well they are lenses similar to DSLRs, but with smaller dimensions, especially in terms of costs.

Another mistake is using flash. You might be tempted, especially at night, but the result will not be as you expected. Smartphones do not have controllable flashes, which adjust the burst of light, so the result will be a flat photo with unwanted shadows behind the subject. In this case, try to get the most of the light source in the environment you are in, the results will be much better than using the flash. If you have superior phones than you can produce decent results even in low lights.

The last tip, check it out that your lens is always clean. Dust, drops and fingerprints could ruin a perfect shot.

3 Light

We can use the top mobile phones, but if we don’t learn how to play with the light, we could end with over / under exposed photos. In fact, happens a lot that we take photo of us with beautiful sunset and then we find us too dark in the picture, or the sun doesn’t appear nice at all.  However, the best example is during middle day, when the daylight is so harsh, means pictures are normally getting over exposed, which are too bright.

Therefore, time make it different. Many people do not know that the worst time to take pictures is when the sun is at its maximum height, i.e. between 11 and 15 o’clock, during this time the probability of ruining your photos is very high, especially if you are not experienced. While if you are shooting one hour after sunrise or before sunset, you can get a very nice result as your final product. Even so, remember to position the focus circle between the subject and the scenario, picking the right balance to avoid to big differences in brightness. In this case, mobile phone with a very good HDR displays a richer range of colours, brighter whites and very deep blacks. To be more precise HDR technology (High Dynamic Range), allows to capture the differences in brightness with greater liveliness and in a much more realistic and immersive quality, without however neglecting all the gradations in the light and dark areas.  If we have a measured vacation, so we can’t wait for the right hours, we can help ourselves through polarized filters, able to reduce the intensity of light evenly over the whole photo. In a very simple way, we do buy sunglasses for our sensors and we will have more performing photos depending on the filter.

4 Format

It is one of the most underrated aspects, the choice of format, easier say to take photos vertically or horizontally. In addition, usually phones have two more options: square or panoramic. Now even if the photo format does not affect the graphic, neither quality, is essential about the final use. To explain it in simple words horizontal photos are not match in terms of visibility with vertical photos in Instagram. The reason is simple, the social network is born to capture instant photos or video with our mobile phones, so all the users log in with smartphones, and a vertical photo will fill better our displays. Just look at your smartphone, a vertical image fill up the entire screen, while the horizontal only takes 1/3 of the screen, and is even worst with panoramic photos, only 1/5. So on social media it is easier to focus on a vertical image while horizontal images stand out more on computer screen for the same reason explained above.

The solution in these cases is trivial, but not obvious. We need to think carefully about the purpose of our photography and shoot accordingly. I want a portrait photo for my IG or FB profile, I will choose a vertical format, I want to capture an amazing panorama to print, certainly horizontal, and both format works great for blogs. At last, the square format could be the right compromise for both uses.

5 Post production

The last tip is also the last operation we do normally before we publish a photo.

We all use photo retouching, more or less, starting with the simplest but also the most used ones: filters. Pay attention! Fixing a photo, enhancing is fine, as long as you don’t overdo it. Remember the best shoot is at the right time, with unusual angle and good subject. Technology helps to improve the value, and big step forward is RAW file in the phone. To explain it easier, pro photographers prefers shooting in RAW because has enormous amount of information to work with (colour grading). However, in this article we will limit ourselves to recommending some free APPs to improve your photos.

The first application is PicsArt, an application that allows you to do multiple things: retouching, photo transformations, collages, templates, drawings, filters and more. Similar is Snapseed, the professional photo editor developed by Google, or Lightroom by Adobe, but the more professional the more you need to learn about.

Whatever you choose, don’t forget to never overdo it, because there is nothing more beautiful than something as Mother Nature did it.