Smartphone cameras have improved dramatically in the last few years and most of the new mobile cameras have lots of features from the digital cameras.

The advantage of mobile digital photography is that the camera fits in your pocket and is always with you anytime. The best camera is the one you have with you when the opportunity is there to be able to catch great moments even if not planned.

The tools may be different but the factors that make an image great are the same regardless of the gear that is used to capture it.

It is your eye, mind, and skill that make you a professional, not your gear. It isn’t as high professional digital cameras, but it can be a good option in lots of situations.

Here are some tips that can help you get the best out of your mobile camera.

1.Know your gear

Understand how your mobile phone camera works and get familiar with its limitations. Go into the settings and keep trying the different settings and moods.

2. Light

It’s all about the light. That’s what will help make a good photo a great photo.

Wait for the right light. Use the sun. Check out the shadows that the sun makes on subjects. Notice the reflective light off buildings. Watch how the light from a window falls inside a room at different moments. Take shots during the “golden and blue hours”.

The smart phone is not the greatest in low light situations. It’s preferable to capitalize on lighting conditions your device functions under best.

Try not to use mobile phone camera flash often, it’s bad and can ruin what would otherwise have been a nice shot.

Your final image will always be better if you get the exposure right in-camera: this is just as true with a mobile camera as a DSLR. Even with all the great editing apps and filters available, exposure fundamentals remain the same. Get it right in-camera then play with it afterwards.

3. Adjust Exposure Manually

You can adjust the lighting manually through your camera. Try to investigate the “Manual Mode” in your camera phone and have its benefits.

4. Clean the lens

Your Phone spends a lot of time in your pocket, a bag or in your hand, and as a result it will get dirty. Dirt, dust, grease and fingerprints on your lens will have a big effect on the quality of your photos.

It will block light from entering the camera’s sensor and will leave smudges, blurs or dust spots on your images. A clean lens will ensure you get sharp, clear images with your camera Phone.

But take care to clean it with Soft cloth or cotton in order not to be scratched.

5. Set the Focus

Tap the screen and a small square or circle will appear let this square or circle pointed on your main subject. This will let it be sharper.

6. Don’t use the zoom

Unfortunately this is a digital zoom and not an optical zoom. In essence what happens with a digital zoom is that the image is cropped as you zoom in. This results in a loss in image quality the more you zoom in.

If you want to take a photo of a faraway subject, don’t use the zoom. Walk closer instead and use the camera as normal without any zoom. You’ll end up with a far better quality shot.

Alternatively you can crop the image yourself in the editing process to bring the viewer closer to your subject. Cropping afterwards gives you more control over how much of the image you want to remove, but also don’t crop too much as this will lead to losing some of the photo quality.

An Austrian-born photojournalist called “Ernst Haas” once said “The best zoom lens is your legs.” Zoom With Your Feet rather than with your lens.

7. Use Panorama Mode

There are certain situations where the standard camera just won’t be able to capture the whole scene you’re trying to capture. For example, you might want to take a shot of an expansive landscape, a cityscape or a wide building, but can’t fit everything in the frame. This is where you should use panorama mode.

8. Keep Your Camera Steady

You need to keep your camera always steady without shaking, especially in dark light as it uses slow shutter. The problem with this is that any movement of the camera will result in a blurred image.

You can use the timer to help you keeping your camera steady.

9. Take Multiple Shots

If you see something that catches your eye don’t just take one shot and hope for the best. The chances of getting a good photo with your first shot are very few. You should take shots from various angles and distances. If you find an angle or point of view you like then take multiple shots from that position. This helps ensure that you get a well composed shot that is in sharp focus and if one is hazy the other would probably be good.

The beauty of digital photography is that you can delete all the photos that didn’t work… and there will be a lot that don’t work!

Just take care of your storage 🙂

10. High resolution

Always save your photos at the highest possible resolution as this will let you reach good quality photos as well as helping to edit those photos with minimum loss in resolution.

All pictures in this article are taken by my mobile 🙂

How to look good in a photo? How to pose right while taking a photo?

Those questions are always on our minds when taking photos.

Lots of people when looking at their own photos they don’t like their shape, or wonder why they don’t look good or why aren’t they smiling enough or even why are they looking fat.

Let me tell you about 8 tips if you take care of you’ll probably be more satisfied from your photos.

1. The Eye

The Eyes are the door for your personality and it expresses your personality and feelings. Let your eyes smile, don’t just smile with your mouth.

2. The Smile

The best smile is that natural one from your inside, not just an artificial one for the photo.

Show your teeth without showing your gums, don’t open your mouth widely

3. The Nose

If you have a long nose try not to give your face side to the camera, but rather with a small angle.

4. The Head

Try to have it in a middle angle to the camera, neither up nor down. Keep your chick down a little and to the front.

5. The Shoulders

The widest part of our body is the shoulder. When we face the camera in the photos that shows us wide/fat and gives a feeling of attack and aggressiveness. It is always better to stand our shoulders by the side, that would make us look better.

6. The Hand

We always ask where shall we put our hands.

First; don’t stick your hands to your body. You can put it in your waist with your fingers shown.

If you’ll put your hands in your pocket; don’t put it all inside, keep your thumb outside the pocket.

Don’t let the elbows face the camera.

If you will fold your hands, keep your palm outside with your fingers shown.

7. The Legs

How should we stand and what is the best position for our legs?

Don’t make them tight, keep them comfortable and you may bend one of them.

It is better to keep them closed a little not opened widely, and you may put one in-front of the other.

8. The Body

Keep your body straight, whether you are standing or sitting. If not, that would make some details of your body seen while you didn’t want to show them.

Here are some references for this article

Poses for good photos 1

Poses for good photos 2

Poses for good photos 3

Poses for good photos 4

Also here are some poses for couple and group photos

Couples Photos

Group Photos

Family Photos

The third and last element of the exposure triangle is the “ISO”

The ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. It stands for “International Standards Organization”, and it is a standardized industry scale for measuring sensitivity to light.

ISO figures starts by 100 in most of the cameras till more than 20 thousand and this highest figure differs from a camera to another.

Like the other elements ISO controls 2 things.

-First is the quantity of light coming to the camera .. a bigger ISO number lets more light into the camera & vice versa.

-Second is the image quality .. what does this mean?

Simply the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain.

A bigger ISO number may lead to noise and a bad quality picture.

Anyone needs to understand it more, please tell me.

The second element in the exposure triangle is the “Shutter speed”

This aspect is measured by seconds – it could be a second, portion of a second or more than a second.
A second or more is written as 1″
A portion of a second is written 1/100 for example

Shutter speed controls 2 things.

-First is the quantity of light coming to the camera .. a slower shutter speed lets more light into the camera and vice versa.

-Second is motion .. what does this mean?
Simply it is showing the motion or freezing it.
Have a look on the two photos of “Tanoora” I took below nearly from the same place with everything fixed except for the shutter speed and aperture to compensate the light that will be affected by the change in the shutter speed.
In the one showing the motion the shutter speed number is bigger (a bit slow) – 1/20
While in the one that doesn’t show the motion the shutter speed is smaller (a bit faster) – 1/125

I put a photo that explains the whole picture and another very famous picture in this subject which is the paper flower rolling from air.

Anyone needs to understand it more, please tell me.

How do you think of pictures?

What attracts you the most in any picture?

What do you think are the main aspects that forms a picture?

Any photo depends on composition, idea, lighting, moment, colors and quality.

Composition and idea are the main factors of a good photo, but also the lighting is very important, as you may have all the factors above with good means and the lighting is not good so the photo will not be good either.

How can we take a a good photo and how can we fulfill all the above aspects?

As I mentioned above that lighting is a core factor for a good photo, So how could I settle good lighting for a good photo?

There is a very important expression in photography and it is always repeated which is “Exposure Triangle” what does that mean?

From the word triangle we can notice that it has to be consisted of 3 elements with some sort of relation between them .. those elements are:
1- Aperture
2- Shutter Speed
3- ISO

Each element has a role to get a good photo which I will elaborate separately

The ISO … It’s a long story and it’s really meant to be related to the choice of the camera but rather how we take a photo which I’ll talk about later.

The ISO number on the camera is measuring the sensitivity of the sensor to light.

In some situations we need to have a low ISO (especially when we have light) and others we need to have it high (especially when it is dark).

Each camera has a maximum number for the ISO which if we go higher the photo will have noise and will be not clear.

This high ISO number is a thing we need to ask about when buying a camera. There is more than a site that have this information and you can look on the high ISO number of the camera you chose on those sites before you buy it.

Example of those sites is http://snapsort.com

Megapixels … the most common term we hear and usually ask about in the field of cameras and mobile cameras.

Is it that important?

Briefly it is important in increasing the quality of the photo, but not alone it’s importance is that in combination with the camera sensor that we talked about in a previous article. Camera Sensor.

The range of megapixels varies from a camera to another. The highest megapixel number reached till now is about 50 megapixels in Canon 5Ds.

A thing to look at when choosing a camera is the number of focus points.

What does that mean? The focus points are those points pointing to a certain object in the photo and you can choose that through your camera screen.

When taking a photo you need to determine what your target is and put it in focus to get better results.

You can decide whether to take one point or an area or leave the focus open for the entire photo.

Cameras focus points range from 9 to 51. The more points the easier you can define your target in the photo and would be more specific.

I took pictures for the different modes of focus in the camera.