Stop me if any of this sounds familiar...
> Your photos are missing something - leaving you feeling stuck, underwhelmed and frustrated
> You are tired of spending countless hours on YouTube and are not improving your photography
> Photography brings you joy and fulfilment you love the convenience of using your smartphone
This roadmap is the start to feeling confident and satisfied that you can create beautifully composed photos on your existing smartphone in any location, every time... without having to upgrade your phone.
In the above video, I share with you the benefits and list of features of our educational community, the Smartphone Photography Club.
Already a Club Member... these links in the roadmap will take you straight to the content inside your library.
Feel jealous and question why your photos don't look stunning and creative like other as you scroll through social media. This brings up feelings of self-doubt, frustration and being underwhelmed with the results. This leaves us blaming our device, believing it is too old, screen is too small or limited in features. It is not your fault!
This roadmap covers all the necessary steps within the planning, capture and photo editing phases. Hang onto your hat... there is a lot of content to get through.
Famed photographer Elliot Erwitt once said, 'Photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them'.
This quote encapsulates seeing that unique photographic opportunity, having an intention for what you want to produce to create the photo through composition and editing to further enhance the viewer experience.
While anyone can whip out their smartphone and snap a shot, with just a little bit of forethought and a couple of alterations, you can substantially elevate an otherwise garden-variety photo. To find out how to start creating your best smartphone photos in 15 steps, continue reading below and take your smartphone photography from common to captivating.
As with most endeavours, the first step to taking better pictures is proper planning. Before opening the camera on your smartphone, take a moment to think about your intention for taking a photograph. Try asking yourself a couple of questions like
Keeping with your pre-photography planning, prior to taking a photo with your smartphone, consider the story that you're attempting to tell with this photo. What is the narrative you'd like to communicate to your viewer? Will it assist the viewer to have a visual anchor within their photo to initially notice before being directed around the photo in a sequence (visual hierarchy) that communicates the context and story?
Imagine your photo from the perspective of a viewer and break it down into a more abstract form of blocks of tones and colour, shape, form and visual hierarchy… to effectively craft a distinct narrative that your audience can interpret.
Unlike video, in photography, we need to provide a narrative. Similar to writing, this can include characters, settings, subplots, drama and tension. Storytelling does not need to be dramatic and completely intentional or have layers of complexity including contextual subjects in the scene. It can be as simple as asking the question of what is happening in this photo.
The one consistent element in storytelling is the moment it is captured. Imagine the paused moment (photo) of a person walking along a waterfront. It already has us attempting to fill in the gaps of who they are, where have they been or where are they going. What are they wearing? What is the weather like? In a nutshell, the narrative is the open question you have asked the viewer to answer using their own experiences and imagination.
Note: Club members - access more information about storytelling - here
An example of storytelling that we are all familiar with, is the holiday selfie photo at a destination that you want to share. The intention is to communicate where you are. Instinctively, you will likely position yourself off to the side of the frame to include the background. This is a compositional technique referred to as off-center or the rule of thirds. The story is about you being present at this location. In your preparation, you have provided space to look over your shoulder.
Now that you have a starting vision and outcome for the photo in mind, you can start to think about where to position yourself in relation to the main visual anchor (subject). Do you need to be close, shoot from above or below or take into account the lighting quality, strength and direction?
You can also change your location or position to accentuate existing lines, patterns, and textures further. For example, by rotating the smartphone and tilting the photo, you can add energy and change the dominant element in the scene. Sometimes, even the most minor changes can have the most significant impact, like taking a few steps to the side, finding an elevated position, or lying on the ground.
Once you have identified the subject and background, your positioning will determine how they align. Moving and pivoting around the subject will change both how lighting shapes the subject and the contrast against the background.
Some technique examples include Capture height, Subject to lens distortion Perspective distortion Forced perspective - depth Symmetry - vertical, horizontal, spiral & radial.
Note: Learn over 100 composition techniques in my book - here
4. Position the Main Visual Anchor
Now, where do we position the main subject... the hero of the photo.
Setting up how much space and where your subject is positioned inside the frame and use of space is essential to the overall arrangement of your photograph.
Not every photo needs to have an anchor or main subject, but it certainly helps to create a captivating photo! Typically, you should include one main area or subject/focal point to attract viewers’ eyes and engage them. That focal point can be a single subject, a foreground interest, a gesture, single colour or texture.
How do we achieve this? First, ask yourself these questions: Is the main subject/area in focus? Is the subject well-lit? Is the subject sharp? Is the subject colourful? If your subject is a person, are they making eye contact with the camera or something else in the photo?
Some technique examples include,
Note: Inside the Smartphone Photography Club, you will find the Stronger Photo Composition 4-Step System, containing an additional 16 techniques - Link here
5. Position Your Supporting Elements
First, what are elements? These are any contextual items, including the subject, background, etc., within the frame that provides context to the photo's location, time, activity, and even mood. The narrative in a photo is determined by more than just the inclusion of elements; it's also how and why those elements interact with each other.
Once your subject is in place and ready to go, you can start the process of positioning the other elements in your photo. Use this step to align your leading lines, ensure your sense of scale is accurate or as creatively intended, and see if you can find any fresh or unique ways to heighten elements like colour, depth, texture, etc.
Take notice of how different contextual elements interact with one another to enrich the composition of your picture. For a more compelling shot, think about integrating additional elements to complement and enhance your subject (i.e., introducing a person into an otherwise inanimate photo or a pop of colour in a monochromatic scene).
Some technique examples include,
It sounds silly, but there isn't a photographer dead or alive that hasn't accidentally ruined a beautiful shot with a dirty lens. It only takes a couple of seconds to do, and I promise you'll be thankful you did.
To remove dust, fingerprints, and any debris that might be on your lens, just use a lens wipe or folded microfiber cloth. Never use harsh chemicals to clean your camera lenses. Tissues can also leave residue on the lens!
For the best results, I recommend using a cotton bud. This absorbs those skin oils and reaches into those tight areas around your multiple lens array. Make sure you don’t forget to also clean inside your smartphone cover and the front and rear of any lens attachments.
With your smartphone camera accessories in place, it's time to adjust the camera settings on your phone. In most native camera apps, you can tap to focus your lens and swipe to adjust the brightness. You may also be able to access other settings depending on the smartphone's make and model.
On the iPhone, I shoot my day-to-day photos using Live Photos. This gives me the option to edit the photo and select the frame within the capture that offers the precise timing that I wanted. You have taken a group photo where someone has their eyes closed! For landscape or low-light photos, I change the photo format for the higher-performing ProRaw.
You may enjoy testing out different camera replacement apps when taking photos. Most Android phones already include a Pro mode, which provides complete manual control over a broad range of settings such as focus, balance, ISO, and shutter speed. On the iPhone, my favourite camera replacement apps include Even Longer by developer Mario Tomiak, ProCamera by developer Cocologics and Lightroom by Adobe.
Though most smartphone cameras have some form of preprogrammed OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) and even a sensor stabilization system, you can better your photography by stabilizing your phone physically. One way to do this is to take up a sure-footed stance and tuck your elbows in against your body or hold the smartphone against a solid object.
If you're taking photos at night, in low light, or indoors, your phone's low light mode will most likely activate automatically. Some smartphones have the ability to sense that it is completely stable on a tripod and automatically activate a longer shutter, letting in more light and producing an improved photo
Capture several photos and sort through the lot to find the pictures with the most creative composition, interesting gestures, best timing, sharpest capture, etc. After you have taken your photo, review and pinch and zoom to check your focus and that it is minimal if any motion blur. If moving elements in the scene are blurry and the static areas are in focus, then you may need to review the stabilization or
Blotchy result - If the photo is blotchy and has low resolution, you may need to add more light to get closer to the subject. In some circumstances, like interior photos, you may be better to remove light to activate the low-light mode on the phone!
Blurry result - Did you skip the step to clean your lens? Is there light entering the side of the smartphone camera lens, creating low contrast and affecting the focus? On most smartphones, you can tap on the screen to effectively activate ‘spot focusing’. This overrides the camera autofocus and gives you control. Be mindful that this also activates ‘spot metering’ where now the camera is forced to balance the exposure and may produce undesirable results in the brightness of dark or bright areas of the photo. Many smartphones allow you to tap the screen to focus and then swipe on the screen to adjust the exposure via a brightness slider. On the iPhone, you can pinch and zoom on the screen to get in close to the area you want in focus. Then, tap and hold your finger on the screen until an AE/AF icon appears to lock the focus. You can then pinch and zoom out and the focus will remain locked.
Note: Inside the Smartphone Photography Club, you will find the Blurry to Tack-Sharp Photos 4-Step System - Link here
Missed the moment - In some photographic genres, timing is everything. Taking a burst of photos by continually tapping the shutter icon or volume button may be enough. Some smartphones may have a burst mode or a mode that records a series of photos over a few seconds, allowing you to select the exact frame you want.
Improve the composition - When we are looking at the scene through the little screen on our smartphone, it can be quite easy to miss a background contextual element that only reveals itself when reviewing the photo.
Often, the best photos are the ones that we just keep experimenting with different positioning until we see something on the screen that sparks a bit of creativity with a shape, form or line that we didn’t see before.
Note: Club members - access the Blurry To Tack-Sharp Photos: 4-Step System course -here
Start by straightening and correcting the existing perspective, or creatively introduce an entirely new one. If you have the subscription version of Lightroom mobile, the Geometry tool is my favourite. The free option is the Perspective tool inside the Snapseed app. The Perspective tool offers a rotate feature that is better than the stand-alone Rotate tool. There are also features to scale/squash and stretch the image using the freeform option, changing the viewpoint from side to side.
Next, crop and trim any unwanted or distracting content from the edges of the frame or achieve your desired aspect ratio. Sometimes a crop can change the entire composition and feeling of a photo. A close crop can be much more intimate and/or reveal more detail missed with a wide-angle perspective. The crop tool is found in even the most limited default photo editor on your phone
Continuing with editing your photography, let's move on to adjusting your colours with colour correction and colour grading.
You may have noticed that oftentimes, the terms colour correction and colour grading are used interchangeably. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake. Colour correction is the process of adjusting colours for realness, with the goal being to make the colours appear as they do to the human eye naturally.
My preference is to use the Lightroom mobile app to correct colours first making them look realistic using white balance (temperature and tint) controls before applying a desired creative look using vibrance and saturation, then adjusting it further using the colour mix and colour grading tools.
The next steps in the colour editing process adjust for hue, saturation, and luminance collectively referred to as HSL.Use the hue slider to replace specific colours with adjacent hues on the colour wheel. To heighten and lessen the strength (intensity) of colours in your photography, swipe on the saturation slider. The last slider luminance, allows you to brighten and darken colours in a photo and directly affect colour saturation.
NOTE:For a much deeper understanding, you can access the Mobile Photo Editing 4-Step System included with your Smartphone Photography Club membership -learn more here
Tones are the brightness values of different bits of visual dots that make up a photo. The tonal range is the difference between the lightest and darkest parts of a photo. While we are on the topic of definitions, the next one of importance to understand is contrast. This is the difference between the two things. An off-white mug on a white desk has low contrast. The difference is minimal, however enough to create separation. If we were editing a photo of this scenario we could increase the contrast by making the mug darker.
Adjusting the tones can creatively set the mood through exposure (bright and dark areas), contrast and edge sharpening.
Snapseed has a few options inside the Tune Image tool, including brightness, contrast, saturation, ambiance, highlights, shadows and warmth. You can also Curves and Tonal Contrast to further enhance specific parts of the tonal range.
Lightroom mobile has many options to adjust and enhance the tones in the Light panel, including exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, the curve tool and extra options inside the Effects panel, including clarity and dehaze.
Note: We edit the colours before the tones, because different colours have different brightness values. As an example... yellow is a brighter colour than purple.
Sharpening and adding detail to your photos can really make it look like you have had a phone upgrade. At best, in the right shooting conditions, an extra sharpening can actually make it hard to distinguish between a phone and a big camera. Big claim, I know!
Most smartphones actually add a little blur/smoothing to the photo. This more often occurs in low light conditions, when the image starts to become grainy (noisy) and has speckled, blotchy artifacts. The more expensive phones have advanced processors (image signal processors) allowing them to apply noise reduction algorithms. It is exciting that technology is advancing.
Adobe Lightroom has some of the best tools for balancing smoothing out artifacts and enhancing details. The Detail panel includes sharpening, radius, detail, masking and noise reduction options. Further to that the texture tool inside the Effects panel.is amazing at adding details without increasing the details of any existing artifacts in the photo. You can also apply a negative value adjustment of the texture tool to add smoothing while preserving large details in the photo
This is where the magic happens! Unlike your default photo editor on your smartphone, some photo editing apps have the option to apply the effect of an enhancement to an exact part of the photo. This is brilliant to enhance the visual hierarchy of elements and really improve the visual flow and viewer experience.
Also known as local adjustments, this extra effort provides your photography with exponential improvement over a smartphone upgrade!
Inside Snapseed, you have Selective and Brush tools for those quick adjustments. There is also a hidden layer and masking feature to apply almost any of the editing tools to exactly where you want. I go into this in further detail inside the Mobile Photo Editing 4-Step System included with your Smartphone Photography Club membership - here
If you're currently on a subscription plan for Adobe Lightroom Mobile, you have a full suite of masking tools to make a precise selection of the photo before using most of the editing tools to make an adjustment to that area only. The current selection/mask tools include selecting the subject, sky, brush, linear and radial gradient, colour and luminance range. The real power of Lightroom mobile masking is the ability to make a selection and then subject a selection within that selection, fine-tuning precisely where to apply your edit adjustment.
Do you have a photo that would be perfect if it weren't for that one particular unsightly item or thing that ruins it? Well, there's actually a way you can fix it. Using one of my favourite photo editing apps, TouchRetouch, you can remove unwanted objects with one or more of their many tools and options. Other apps have similar tools. However, TouchRetouch is a one-purpose app that offers basic to advanced options and exports full-resolution photos
That was a lot of content to read through. You have either been committed and read every word or skipped straight to the end! Either way, this visual example is a great way to see each step in action.
1. Photographic Intention - The intention was to capture these wood ducks in their luscious natural green environment.
2. Story and Narrative - The story developed into a pair of ducks casually doing their thing by the pond.
3. Position Yourself and the Camera - You can see that I changed my positioning to have the pond in the background and lowered my shooting angle to look up at the ducks, instead of down at them from eye level.
4. Position the Main Visual Anchor - In the final composition, I positioned the ducks and made use of space to position one duck in front of the other and have the eye of the main duck off-centre.
5. Position Your Supporting Elements - The second duck off-centre in the background provides depth and adds to the story of wood duck/s at a pond. The second duck adds a secondary story of it appearing to take notice and an interest in me taking the photo. I positioned and waited patiently for the ducks to move around to include an angled foreground, creating asymmetrical balance.
6. Clean Your Lens - Of course, I wiped the lens for this photo… after I realised my first couple of photos were blurry!
7. Camera Mode and Settings - I chose to shoot this photo using the iPhone Portrait mode and take advantage of the upgrade in iOS 16 that additionally blurs the foreground. The bright light in the background turned into lovely bokeh (light dots) to add more visual interest. The Portrait mode on the iPhone has the ability to adjust the strength of the blur effect prior to and post-capture.
8. Stabilize Your Phone - Having sufficient light, the iPhone did not need extra stabilisation. Tapping on the information icon, this photo was captured at ISO 125 and a shutter speed 1/121s. The ducks were relatively slow-moving and did not require a manual photo capture.
9. Review Your Photo and Take More - In this scenario, I was in-situ with the ducks for 5 minutes and captured 40 photos, experimenting with different angles and visual element inclusions. I attempted to pre-empt the behaviours of the ducks and where they would move into a pre-planned composition. Timing and gesture were important in this photo.
10. Straighten and Crop - Having the luxury of time and practice shots and no vertical or horizontal references in the photo, the photo was straight enough. You can see that photo 4 is cropped slightly closer. This brings the main duck’s eye closer to the edge and introduces a bit of visual tension.
11. Modify Your Tones - The feathers on the main duck really add to the story of the type of duck and provide a real visual interest. The tonal value of this part of the photo is in the mid-tones. They are neither the darkest nor the brightest. Using Snapseed Tonal Contrast tool, I could add a lot of contrast in that tonal range leaving the brightest and darkest areas unaffected.
12. Adjust Your Colors - The tonal adjustments affected the green colours in the photo. This required a negative saturation adjustment to bring it back to a natural look. Greens typically get out of control really quickly when adjusting a photo. The vibrance tool inside Lightroom mobile Color panel makes an adjustment to the more muted colours, minimizing the greens to become too vivid.
13. Bring Back the Details - The texture tool inside the Lightroom mobile Effects panel really made the feathers pop and jump off the screen. Further sharpening was done in the next step to avoid over-sharpening the existing and intentionally blurred parts of the photo.
14. Make Your Local (Area-Specific) Adjustments - The head of the main duck has been brightened to encourage that area to be the visual anchor and one of the first parts of the photo the viewer sees first. The eye was brightened and sharpened to really make it stand out further. The feathers have also been brightened to make the textures in the feathers stand out, while also balancing the shadows on the underside to keep it natural looking.
15. Remove Unwanted Objects From Your Photos - To finish off the photo, I used TouchRetouch app to remove the stick poking out of the main duck’s butt!
There you go the 15-step roadmap to creating your next favourite smartphone photo This process can be applied to any photo-capturing device… even the dedicated camera.
To get a deeper understanding of each step of this roadmap, you can access numerous courses and the full Smartphone Transformation Program inside your Smartphone Photography Club membership - here
