Musings 8: Phone photography practice

Greetings Steemit friends! On this musings post, I will share about how I practice using my phone for taking photos. I have been thinking of posting this kind of content ever since my first ever Musings post.^^,)

_{The lighthouse in the middle of Laguna de Bay, as I have shared in this Color Challenge post.}

Almost everyone of us have smartphones nowadays. Chances are, you are reading this from your phone. It's great that as the years rolled by, the camera technology in smartphones have become sophisticated enough for us to take great pictures from them. But instead of taking photos by doing point-and-shoot, you can elevate your work if you just pay attention. If you head over the #photography tag here on Steemit, you can see that most Steemians use their phones to capture great photos. If you are having a hard time figuring out how to take great shots from your phone, the number one rule I can share with you is: treat your smartphone like an actual camera. So that means you must follow the basic photography rules. But as with everything else, you can only get better at it if you practice.

Just like my practice with my dslr, I use my surroundings. And yes, I take shots of the sky view from my apartment's back balcony too.^^ But it isn't really the best place for practice since low light settings tend to push the phone cam's capability.

_{Sunset beacon; taken from my apartment's back balcony using my retired iphone 4s.}

The thing with smartphone camera is that most of them has a fixed aperture, so you have a limited capacity to make most out of your camera. During my time of researching and practicing with phone photography as a complete noob, I have learned to make do with ISO settings and shutter speed. So my second advice to you when you use your phone camera is: have adequate lighting as much as possible.

_{This is the colored version of my Mountain Contours photo. :D}

Speaking of smartphone capabilities, there is one thing I rather appreciate when using a smartphone's camera, it is the HDR mode. It is very handy to take good shots when you have good lighting conditions, and I appreciate it more when taking shots at subjects with contrasting colors. The relatively small size of lens of phone cams also make it a good go-to camera for small subjects (with limitations, of course - the lens of phone camera cannot compete with that of a full spec macro lens for cameras). Check out this photo:

_{A Wolf Spider, taken using my retired iphone 4s.}

But the biggest advantage of smartphones over regular cameras is that they are very handy. You can literally be just walking by, going through your day. When all of a sudden, you see an interesting scenery, and then you can take a shot of it almost immediately. Or maybe you're just walking by as you are on your way home. Then suddenly, without any particular reason, you happened to look up. Then you see some interesting pink clouds brought about by the sunset (it does happen sometimes), made more interesting by the view of the building in front of it (from your view, anyway). Then that's it! You get an interesting photo out of an otherwise unassuming afternoon. Just like what happened to me:

_{The said Building with Pink Clouds backdrop, taken using my soon-to-be-retired Samsung Galaxy S5. :)}

Or maybe you're just walking towards a meeting on a top floor of a building. Then as you are making your way across the walkway towards the other building (because you went in through the wrong building, good thing there is a walkway), you felt curious and peek through the walkway window:

_{The top-down view from the walkway of St. Francis Square Twin Towers, taken using my ancient (needless to say, long-retired) Samsung S Duos 2 7582 phone.}

I hope you learn something from this post to make most out of your smartphone camera. Happy practicing! 😉

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