Tuesday, February 28, 2017

The Best Camera + Picture Practice

They say that the best camera is the one that you have with you.  For me, that usually means my iPhone.  While I often wish I had my DSLR with me to capture certain shots, I do always have my phone with me.  In recent years, the cameras in our little phones have gone through so many improvements that they take pretty decent photos these days.  In addition, there are all kinds of apps out there that allow you some different choices in cameras and also allow you to edit right there in the palm of your hand.

One way I am using my 2017 word--Light--is to focus on using light effectively in my photography. But, there are so many ways I can improve that I thought it might be fun to focus on a different technique each day for the month of March, using only our phones!  Of course, you might want to get out your "real camera" to practice, as well, but I use my iPhone exclusively for Instagram and would like to improve my photography with it as well.

Here's the way it will work:  Each day there will be a prompt that represents some sort of photography technique.  I will post the prompt here on my blog, as well as some information about how to use it to improve our photography using our phones. In some cases, I will show examples to compare as well.  Not all phones are alike and this will give you a chance to learn about the settings on your own phone's camera.  My husband has a Galaxy 7 Edge phone that takes wonderful photos, so I will try to include how to find the various settings on that phone (or Android in general) as well.

If you need to skip around, that is fine, but you will probably be able to do most of these in order since you can use any subject you wish for the prompts.  As usual, be sure to tag your photos with the hashtag #MTPicturePractice2017 and if you have any questions, leave a comment either here or on Instagram and I will answer it the best I can. If you are new to these challenges, leave me a comment with your Instagram info so that I can follow along.  It's great to get inspiration from others, so check out the hashtag from time to time to see what others are doing with their phones!

To get us started, let me just remind you of a couple of a very basic ways you can improve the quality of your phone pictures---
1.  Clean your lens! This may seem obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many times I have taken a photo and then looked at it and realized the lens had been foggy or had a speck on it or whatever.
2.  Keep auto flash OFF by default. A flash throws a lot of light a very short distance, so anything more than a few feet away will not receive the light anyway and the flash was pointless. In most cases a flash is not needed and when it is, you can easily switch it to the on position.

Here is the list of March prompts--have fun and be sure to check here each morning for a few tips/explanations/examples for that particular prompt.



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