Your iPhone has become the #1 camera to use for your everyday’s photos. It’s small, powerful, and you always have it in your pocket. But since more and more people really try toimprove the picture they do with their iPhone, there are still a lot of basic mistakes most of them do frequently. The good news? It’s really easy to avoid them and improve your iPhone photography in minutes.
1. Using the flash
We see each iPhone released with a new improved flash, but unfortunately, the problem remains the same: 99% of the shots using the flash look horrible.
Just keep it OFF, and take your low-light pictures without. Most of the time, the result will end up being even worse: cold colors, big central glare while the sides of the pictures remaining dark.
There is only one case in which you could eventually use the flash: if the subject is less than 2 meters away, and in complete darkness.
2. Missing a photo subject
What are you taking a picture of? If you can’t answer this question, then you probably have no subject on your photography.
Is it important? Well, if you’re ok with taking boring picture of nothing interesting, not really.
But if we consider that your goal is to take good pictures about interesting things to share with anyone, then you should really consider having a subject on your picture.
The subject can be a person, an object, a plant, an animal, or whatever the eye will be attracted to on the first place while looking at your picture.
3. Over-editing your pictures
At a time when everyone can be a photographer in his own way, there is something I still don’t get when I look at people’s pictures: over-editing.
Because they are many different apps to add filters and edit settings doesn’t mean you have to use all of them on every single shot.
And I actually did the same mistake again and again in the past.
The point is: the more you spend time on editing a picture, and the more you will feel like adding more of this setting, or more of this one. And why not another filter. And why not a bit more of contrast to finish?
In the end, the picture will just look horrible.
Instead, you should focus on taking a great picture in the first place, and edit it smoothly so it doesn’t look over-edited.
4. Neglecting the composition
It’s true that with a phone, you can take pictures in seconds as soon as you see something interesting.
But if you want to improve the quality of your pictures, you also have to pay attention to how things are relating to each other in your scene. Try to start thinking about it when you take a picture with your phone.
If you’re a beginner, you can still crop your picture after you take it to adjust the composition and the position of the elements.
But the easiest way is to create the composition directly when you take the picture, by changing the position of the objects, moving around your subject, changing the angle of the camera, etc.
5. Zooming
The zoom of your iPhone is a digital zoom. It means that whenever you use it, you end up having less and less pixels in your picture.
This is exactly the same thing as cropping your picture after you took the shot. Which you’d better do instead. Because you can control exactly what’s on the picture once it’s taken.
So, let’s keep it simple: don’t use the digital zoom of your iPhone. Ever.
What if you actually want to zoom? Well, just get physically closer to your subject. This is the only way to do it properly with your phone.