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We share the secrets of taking great photos with your smartphone.
Posting content to social media isn’t only entertainment today. It’s also an excellent way for brands to stay connected with their audience.
To create engaging social media content, people use smartphones more and more often.
As a rule, being smaller and cheaper than professional cameras, smartphones can take pictures from anywhere and, when used correctly, can shoot photographs with quality sufficient for social media posts and online content.
This article will cover the best techniques and tips that will help capture great pictures and set your social media feed apart from the rest.
Main promotional channels for photo content
Focus on several channels to spread your content for maximum impact. These are Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and email signature banners. Let’s take a closer look at each of these channels.
Being dedicated to sharing photo and video content, this platform is a good way to introduce yourself to the audience and establish your brand’s online presence.
Your Instagram content needs to be relevant and interesting to your followers. And it also needs to look great because people are very selective now.
- Email signature banner
Everyone is using email signatures now to close their emails professionally. Created with an email signature generator, they allow displaying your important contact details, photo, company logo, links to your resources, and much more in every email you send.
If you look at these great email signature examples, you will see that most of them go with banners where you can also use your custom photos.
On Facebook, images and, more recently, videos are often the stars of the show. According to statistics, Facebook posts featuring photo content are the most noticed, liked, and shared.
Another highly visual medium is Pinterest. The platform isn’t just for fashion and home décor. You can use it to promote all sorts of businesses.
Everyone, from regular people to large brands, already catches the attention on these platforms.
Professional photos are no longer a rarity. Furthermore, many of them are made without a professional DSLR camera.
But what if your smartphone photos aren’t good enough to compete with others?
These photos can be enhanced by playing with a wide range of techniques and tricks.
So, below are our seven essential smartphone photo-taking tips to shoot your perfect photos for your social media feeds.
Tip #1: Balance using grid lines
This is one of the easiest ways to improve your mobile photos. If you follow the rule of thirds, you can get a fairly well-balanced shot in terms of composition. To be able to use this option, go to your smartphone settings and enable grid lines. Once you turn it on, you will see a grid on your phone. These will be two lines running vertically and two lines running horizontally. Now, when you are trying to take a new picture, place the object at the intersection of these two lines.
Tip #2: Play with exposure
Exposure (the amount of light) is a crucial part of how bright or dark your photos appear. Sometimes it’s enough to fix this parameter to make everything look right. Tap on the screen, and you will see a slider that helps you control the exposure manually. You can also fix the exposure in your app editor after the photo was taken.
Tip #3: Never zoom in!
This is a very common mistake smartphone camera users make when taking pictures. Or course, it can be tempting to zoom in on your pictures to look closer, but this can lower the quality of your photo significantly. Instead, try to get closer to your subject.
Tip #4: Look for different perspectives
Experimenting with different angles can help your pictures stand out and offer a variety for you to choose from when posting to your social platforms. Angles can give the illusion of depth or height, making your photos more interesting to look at, generating more likes, comments, and shares.
Tip #5: Experiment with reflections
Look for a reflective surface that can become an interesting addition to your composition. You can find some of the most beautiful reflections on the surface of the water (lakes, rivers, big puddles). On top of that, look for glass surfaces, shiny cars, windows, mirrors, wet asphalt, or even your own sunglasses.
Once you have found a nice reflective surface, add an interesting subject to capture as a reflection.
Tip #6: Find symmetry
Using symmetry properly can transform simple pictures into eye-catching ones. People are drawn to visual perfection and harmonious compositions. That’s why symmetrical photos usually stand out.
So, try to create photos where one side of the frame mirrors the other one, and these two sides correspond in size, shape, and position.
Remember to use the gridlines we mentioned in tip #1 to line everything up perfectly.
Tip #7: Turn off flash
It’s not easy to find a quality smartphone photo that was taken with a flash turned on. In most cases, the flesh can make your picture look overexposed, negatively affecting colors and subjects’ sharpness.
During the daytime, you can take advantage of natural light sources. For night photography, it’s better to look for ambient light such as traffic and surrounding buildings.
Furthermore, you can also play with the “Exposure” feature in your editing app once the photo is taken.
Final thoughts: high-quality photos can be taken with your smartphone
Today, you can no longer find excuses for not making quality content for your social media channels. You don’t need to hire a skilled photographer (if you have a limited budget), buy an expensive DSLR camera, or purchase editing software for your desktop computer. Most modern smartphones have excellent built-in cameras that allow taking high-quality photos. The only significant things you need to consider are time, energy, and photography skills.
This article covers exactly how to improve the quality of your smartphone images for social media channels. Follow these seven tips to improve your smartphone photography game quickly and efficiently. Good luck!
