The One Trick to Better Photographs on Your Phone
Most of us take a photograph the same way. We point the phone, we wait for it to decide what to do, and we press the button. The phone is making a great many choices in that half-second, and on the whole it makes them well. But it makes them for an average scene, and your scene is rarely average. There is one small habit that separates a snapshot from a photograph you would want on your wall, and it takes about a second to learn.
Tap the screen, then set the brightness yourself.
That is the whole trick. When you open the camera and tap on your subject, you are doing two things at once. You are telling the phone where to focus, and you are telling it where to read the light. A small slider appears beside the point you tapped, usually marked with a little sun. Drag it up and the image brightens, drag it down and it darkens. You are no longer accepting the phone's guess. You are deciding how the picture should look before you take it.
The reason this matters more than any other setting comes down to how a camera handles light. A phone wants to make everything a pleasant medium brightness, which means it will often lift the shadows and, in doing so, blow out the brightest parts of the scene. The trouble is that detail lost to overexposure cannot be brought back later. As one photography guide puts it plainly, it is far easier to lift a shadow than to recover a blown-out highlight, so when in doubt you protect the bright areas and let the darks fall where they may. Setting the exposure yourself is how you make that choice rather than leaving it to the phone.
The single most useful version of this is for photographs of people. Whatever the light is doing behind them, what you care about is the face. Tap on the face, then nudge the brightness until it looks right, and let the background take care of itself. A writer and photographer making the same point recommends holding your finger on the subject's face before you take the shot, so the face is exposed properly no matter how bright or dark the surroundings are. It is the difference between a silhouette in front of a window and a portrait.
There is a creative use too, and this is where it stops being a fix and becomes a choice. Drag the slider down on purpose and you deepen the shadows, which can give an ordinary scene a quiet, moody weight. Skylum's photography guide notes that slightly underexposing an image deepens the shadows and lends a more sombre, atmospheric tone. The same gesture that rescues a face in harsh light can also turn a flat afternoon into something with mood.
The team at Digital Camera World, who do this professionally, are blunt about it. The tap-and-adjust technique takes a couple of seconds, they say, but it is well worth it for any scene that looks too bright or too dark, and it will transform your images.
You already carry an extraordinary camera. This is simply the difference between letting it decide and deciding for yourself. Tap, set the light, then press the shutter. The next photograph worth framing is probably one tap away.
