Taking the Perfect Photo with Your Smartphone

Last week, Jessica Wallach and Jeremy Hunter from Story Tapestries provided helpful tips and techniques to take the perfect picture with your Smartphone. We had a great time putting the techniques to use on a beautiful fall day. Here are some of the tips we learned:

How to take a photo if you have shaky hands – This is a common problem. Any movement to the camera can result in blurry photos. Fortunately, there are adaptations that can make a big difference.

• Use a tripod or cell phone stabilizer cage to help keep the camera steady.
• Hold your phone with two hands – it reduces camera movement. In this case, you can use voice commands to take the photo. To learn how to use Smartphone voice commands on your phone, click here for Android phone instructions and click here for iPhone instructions.
• Use the “Live” feature on your phone. Once done, use the edit feature to look through the multiple photos that were captured to find the best shot and save it as your preferred photo.

How to Take a Photo in Dark or Bright Places – Using the “Exposure” feature makes a big difference. Smartphone cameras are designed to capture middle gray, which is why when you take a photo of the moon on a dark night it looks like a blur. Likewise, photos of the snow can look washed out. To mitigate this, use the “Exposure” feature. Scroll to the left and use the negative exposure numbers for taking pictures in the dark, like photos of a stage in a dark theater or when capturing a full moon. Scroll to the right and use the positive exposure numbers for taking pictures on a bright sunny day or in the snow.

How to Manage Lighting – Back lighting can ruin a photo. If the lighting is very bright, choose to take pictures that include a little shade. That can be as simple as moving under a building overhang to take a group photo or turning so the light is coming from an angle so it’s not directly behind your subject.

Editing – It is always best to set your phone’s settings in order to take the best picture the first time, but sometimes that’s not always possible. Smartphones have a lot of fun editing features that allow you to change the composition, shadows, exposure, and even turn a color picture to black and white. Don’t be afraid to play with the editing features. You can always opt against saving the edited version if you don’t like the outcome.

Here are some beautiful fall photos taken by the group:

This program was made possible thanks to a grant from The Washington Home Foundation.

Warm regards,

Stephanie