Photography Is A Story That I Fail To Put Into Words

Polaroid The Photography Society
Nov 15, 2021
3 min read

Updated: Nov 25, 2021

Do you also want to be good at clicking pictures? Want to impress your friends by your photography skills, want your camera roll to be filled up by aesthetic pieces of pixels, don’t worry we got your back.

So here is the ultimate mobile photography basics 101! In this blog I’ll be sharing stepwise approach to the basic understanding what all is phone photography about?

• Clean your lens

• Using the pro mode

• Focus

• Iso

• Shutter speed

• Grid lines

Clean your lens: When it comes to phone, always keep your phone clean most importantly keep your lens area super clean, use a small clean cloth to do so, because most of the time our phone is in use and in such case, it is obvious that it will get lot of dust and dirt which surely will affect your picture and we don’t want that for sure.

Using the pro mode: Nowadays every phone comes with embedded pro mode, keep in mind that we always need to use the pro mode while clicking pictures, the pro mode comes with different features about which we will see in the following texts, namely it has focus, iso and shutter speed. Other features may also be included in some other devices but these three are the major and most important ones which we need to take care of in order to take brilliant pictures.

Focus: So, the first thing is FOCUS, as the name suggests is used to focus on our subject, use this for macro, bokeh or in any simple use.

It has distance counter which can be set to bring all the objects under that distance into focus rest all will remain out of focus. A wise use of this tool will result into extremely good pictures.

ISO: ISO is your camera’s sensitivity to light. The lower the ISO the less sensitive it is to light and higher the greater sensitivity to light. On your cell phone the lowest ISO is usually 100 which is called your base number. ISO is one of the factors in determining the correct exposure of a photo. By changing the images sensitivity to light it determines how well exposed a photo will turn out. A low number will give you less ability to access light and a high ISO will give you greater light. In simple terms shooting in low light requires high iso and shooting in light requires high iso, well it is totally trial and error process, for every picture it needs different iso to look perfect.

Shutter speed: Shutter speed refers to the amount of time the camera’s shutter remains open and allows light to reach the sensor. This time is measured and expressed in seconds and fractions of a second.

A shutter speed of 1/30 means that the sensor will capture the image for 1 thirtieth of a second, which is pretty quick. A shutter speed of 1/3200 is even quicker! So, the larger the denominator, the faster the shutter speed.

The smaller the denominator, the slower the shutter speed. As the shutter speed slows down, the fractions of a second start becoming full seconds. This means the sensor is exposed to light for longer.

Some smartphone cameras can have shutter speeds as slow as 30s, meaning the image is captured for a full 30 seconds.

Again, talking in simple terms if you want to take picture of fast-moving objects then keep the shutter speed high and if you want to create stuff like long exposures and etc. Then go for low shutter speeds.

Grid lines: One of the easiest and best ways to improve your mobile photos is to turn on the camera's gridlines. That superimposes a series of lines on the screen of your smartphone's camera that are based on the "rule of thirds" — a photographic composition principle that says an image should be broken down into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, so you have nine parts in total.

According to this theory, if you place points of interest in these intersections or along the lines, your photo will be more balanced, level, and allow viewers to interact with it more naturally.