Photography on Mobile Phones | 31 Days of Photo Tips

I’ve written before about camera phone photography and reviewed iPhone photography apps that I’d used but it’s been awhile.

With increased quality, social sharing apps and apps to upload photos to print, there are more and more reasons to use a camera phone frequently. There are fewer dials and buttons but the same basic premises of photography exist when trying to take a good photo.

Timing: camera phones tend to lag a bit. Try to predict the moment you want to snap ahead of time.

Composition: Rule of thirds, leading lines, framing, unique perspectives – all of the things that make a pleasing looking image still hold true when using a smartphone.

Exposure: If possible, try to create a situation with sufficient natural light to light your scene. Just like regular cameras, the flash on camera phones doesn’t do much to flatter a photo and poorly lit camera phone photos tend to be very grainy. On an iPhone, you can tap on different areas of the photo to change the exposure (lighter, darker).

Zoom: Zoom with your feet if possible. Camera phones only have digital zoom (remember why we don’t use that?) On an iPhone, you zoom in camera the same way you do in the browser, with the two finger pinch/spread.

I have vastly narrowed down the photography iPhone apps I use now.

Instagram – If you haven’t heard of this app, you might be living under a photography rock. It’s a social sharing app for photos. You can upload one you’ve already taken or take a new one through the app and then apply any of a number of filters. Find me there under the username mkfiasco or view my photos here if you don’t have the app.

Adobe Photoshop Express – Great for simple adjustments like straightening, cropping, adjusting exposure and saturation.

Snapseed – I’ve just added this one to the arsenal so I’m still getting used to it. It looks as though it could be a replacement for Photoshop Express, with some additional features. Most of its features are for basic adjustments as mentioned in the description above for PE but it also has some effects filters like Vintage, Grunge, Tilt Shift, etc.

Hipstamatic – I moved away from this app for quite awhile after tiring of it and also of its prevalence but have recently started using it here and there again. It has a lot of fun filters and effects, especially with the add-on packs, and it’s nice to mix things up amidst the heavy Instagram filter use.

LemeLeme, LemeCamera – The Leme apps used to be excellent but the creators are slowly destroying them with terrible updates like watermarking their name on all the photos and using horrible, gimmicky pirate noises and other atrocities.

Diptic – Allows you to assemble layouts of two, three of four photos. Great for mini-collages.

TiltShiftGen – Even though Instagram has a tilt-shift filter within it, I prefer this app better as it’s more customizable. Allows you to create a tilt-shift effect (blur some of the photo).

PostalPix – As I mentioned in this post on printing, I use PostalPix to get prints of my iPhone photos straight from my phone. It’s a super easy app to use and a good way to have some tangible results from the millions of photos that live on the iPhone. (There’s currently 1100+ and that’s just from the past couple of months.)

If there’s interest, I can do a complete review of the apps I’ve used since I initially wrote this but for now, these are really my staple apps.

There are also a number of improvements to the iPhone camera app with iOS5.

• Access the camera from the lock screen by double-clicking the home button. You can click on the camera icon and immediately be taken to the app, even if your phone has a passcode.
• Turn on a grid to help practice the rule of thirds (under the options within the camera app).
• Use the volume up button to snap the shutter.
• Move from the camera to the camera roll simply by swiping back.
• Edit photos within the camera roll. You can auto-enhance, fix red-eye, crop and rotate.

Android users, I’m sorry to say I have no personal experience with any Android-specific apps. I’ve read that Photowonder and Vignette are ones enjoyed by photographers but if you have any suggestions, please share in the comments!