Taking Good Outdoor Photos With a Smartphone

I like a good DSLR camera but I’m elated to know that I can capture a nice snow-capped mountain using my smartphone. Those genius professional landscape photographers are now starting to feel threatened after spending a fortune on gears—threatened by the mass that can get their hands on iPhones and Android phones with dope cameras. With the competitive smartphone market, phone cameras just keep getting better and better as many brands will keep innovating on phone camera technology. Pretty soon, they will be nearly as good, if not equally good, as standalone cameras such as digital, DSLR, or mirrorless ones. A phone camera is already adequate for landscape and outdoor photography in a lot of cases and conditions. Apart from that, your fancy phone right now is a lot lighter and more multipurpose than bulky traditional cameras and you can easily edit photos on your phone and pin it straight on your Instagram feed. There are ways and techniques to consider when taking outdoor photos using your phone (coined as phonetography) given the limitations your smartphone camera has.

 

Make Sure the Horizon is Straight

Let’s start off with quite a simple one, so simple that it’s quite easy to perfect – keeping the horizon straight. It makes a heck of a difference when the noticeable horizontal line, that can be the surface of the ocean, the mountain base, or the outline of a valley, is straight. Straight as in parallel to the top and bottom of your phone screen frame. To make it easier, you can enable the grid display on your camera as a guide. However, it is occasionally inevitable for the line to be crooked so you can always take subsequent shots or edit (rotate the image) it later.

 

Keep Your Hands Steady

To make the horizon straight, you need to keep the camera steady. Not only keeping your hand(s) stationery can make the landscape horizon straight but it can also make the photo as refined as possible. Unsteady hands can make the photo blurry. This is particularly the case when taking pictures in low-light conditions in which the camera shutter speed is slower.  Photography jargon number one: shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter will open to permit more light especially in low-light surroundings. A longer shutter speed enables a blurred effect on moving objects.

 

Catch the Sunrise or Wait for the Sunset

Both sunrise and sunset give photos vivid effects. It’s either you rise up very early in the morning or you wait till the sun sets. If the sun is way up the sky, there’s an overwhelming light that creates harsh shadows from and through the objects that can generate unappealing contrast. When the sun is lower, the sky is more effervescent and multi-coloured that makes the setting look more dramatic. If taking photos under bright-light conditions, consider activating the HDR (see further below).

 

Never Ever Zoom

Zooming is one of the common mistakes in outdoor phonetography. The reason being the majority of smartphone cameras only have digital zoom (as opposed to optical zoom). Digital zooming degrades the quality of the photo. Simply put it this way – it basically takes a portion of a better-quality photo and it enlarges it resulting in a conspicuous loss in detail. If possible, get closer to the scene.

 

Determine the Focused Subject

While the auto-focus feature can help with setting the desired focus, it would be better to indicate the subject even more. This is usually done by tapping on the object on your phone screen. This sharpens the subject more and gives a little less attention to the surrounding. This is effective if the subject is close to the camera. Outdoor photos without a subject (e.g. a person standing in the way or a bird perched on a branch) may have a little less noticeable focus on one object.

 

Apply the Rule of Thirds

Photography jargon number two: composition. A photo with good composition is quite striking. In the simplest terms, the composition is the arrangement, position, and aggregation of things in a scene. One of the most common composition techniques is the rule of thirds. Almost all smartphone camera interfaces have a grid feature of two vertical lines and two horizontal lines. You can position the subject (or supporting objects) along the lines or the meeting points of the lines of the grid to give the scene some visual balance and give the objects some proportion. You don’t always have to rely on gridlines though. You can mentally locate those lines and use your own judgement and see what works best.

 

Consider Complementary Objects

Be aware of everything in the surrounding that can support the scene. Examples are a sailboat passing through or a tree standing on the side. Make sure these details complement the sight and not disruption-making, things that have relevance to the picture.

 

HDR is Your Bestfriend

Your smartphone camera is less capable than your eyes. Your eyes can see a greater dynamic range. You can see dark objects in detail against a bright surrounding. Your phone camera on the other hand sees a high contrast scene in which dark objects are almost silhouetted and bright objects are drowned by lighting. Luckily your phone most likely has the HDR feature. Most of you may have ignored the HDR feature before and disabled it. Photography jargon number three: High Dynamic Range or HDR enables the phone camera to take multiple photos in one snap. The good parts in those photos are then merged into one image resulting in even exposure hence making bright objects more pronounced and dark objects more detailed. This is particularly useful in settings with overpowering natural or artificial light or in dim light settings.

 

Take Advantage of the RAW Feature

Many smartphone cameras can be RAW-enabled. Photography jargon number four: RAW capture keeps an image file that has preserved a lot of its data which can give you opportunities for systematic editing without losing the quality of the image. You don’t have to worry too much about this if you’re quite new to photography or phonetography. In the future, you should consider learning about how you can make photos look better by editing uncompressed RAW files.

 

Edit, Edit, Edit!

You can always remedy your photos through editing. Editing involves cropping, rotating, resizing, light and colour adjustments, filtering, and lots of other image manipulation techniques. There are tons of mobile applications out there (apart from the built-in one in your phone) that can help you correct your outdoor photos and give them a different vibe or feel. Do not be troubled by the #nofilter movement LOL. Filtering is used by professional photographers and so should you. However, over-filtering can drastically alter your photos making them look a bit synthetic so don’t go too hard on it.

Photo by Jordan McQueen on Unsplash