“The best camera is the one that’s with you.” Photographer Chase Jarvis popularized that aphorism in 2009, using it as the title for his book of photographs taken with mobile phones. Consumers seem to agree with him: According to the Camera and Imaging Products Association, sales of digital cameras have been dropping 14% year-over-year. (They took a 54% dive last year, no thanks to COVID-19.)
By comparison, the Pew Research Center reports that 97% of American adults now own a cellphone, and that 85% of them own a smartphone. In short, it’s very likely that your smartphone isn’t just the camera that’s with you, but the only camera you own.
Unsurprisingly, this shifting paradigm coincides with our increasing effort to document every single, solitary person, place or thing within our sight. Instagram has roughly 1 billion monthly users, many of whom maintain multiple accounts. (Google up “Finsta.”) Taking photographs used to be a considered act—you had to think of how many shots you had remaining on a roll of film, how much space you had left on a memory card—but it’s now a reflex. What we once saved for sunsets we now use to remember where we parked.
Given that, it’s too easy to forget that photography can be art. (Or perhaps your first and only camera is a smartphone, and it has informed all your creative choices—shooting everything as you would an Instagram Live or TikTok video, in portrait orientation, with scarcely a nod to the rule of thirds.) While it would take more than a few minutes to outline the fundamentals of good photography, here are a few tips for improving your smartphone photography.
PORTRAIT VS. LANDSCAPE
Put simply, portrait shots are taller than they are wide, and landscape shots are the opposite. Most people shoot everything in portrait, and have a convincing reason to do so: Instagram doesn’t accommodate landscape shots all that well. (To be fair, Instagram barely accommodates portrait shots. One of the app’s biggest drawbacks is its insistence in squeezing everything into a 1:1 ratio, which is as square as can be.)
But portrait orientation is a poor choice for capturing buildings and natural scenes, and a really poor choice for action shots; a moving object, contained in a portrait-shaped box, has nowhere to go. Turn the phone sideways and shoot those sweeping vistas and sprinting athletes in landscape orientation, using a 3:4 ratio. Use portrait orientation just for, y’know, portraits.
AVOID USING DIGITAL ZOOM
Where optical zoom uses the full capability of your smartphone’s lenses (most of the newer models, both Android and Apple, have more than one), digital zoom is a cheat; it’s really more of an in-phone cropping. Digital zoom photos are often grainy and unfocused, even in newer smartphone models that use AI and higher-resolution sensors to increase quality. Generally speaking, you’re better off standing closer to whatever you’re shooting—or, if that’s not possible, shooting at your highest optical zoom setting, then cropping the image later using a post-processing app like Photoshop or Snapseed. I like to photograph neon signs for my Instagram feed (@mostlyelectric), and shooting them from a moderate distance with optical zoom better preserves not only their sharpness, but their color.
USE YOUR TIMER
Taking a group shot? Don’t selfie-arm it; prop the phone up on something, set the timer and rush into position. The same goes for nighttime shots; even if your phone has a “night” setting, the timer gives you a few seconds to steady the phone on something, like a miniature tripod. (Joby’s GripTight One GorillaPod, which adapts to standing/clinging to nearly any surface and is compatible with virtually every smartphone model, is $25 very well spent.)
TIPS FROM A PRO
Ginger Bruner has mastered pretty much everything with a lens and a shutter, but nine times out of 10, the Las Vegas native prefers to shoot with her iPhone. “You can make just as good of art with a phone as you can with a huge camera,” she told the Weekly’s Leslie Ventura in 2017, and she continues to prove just that through the Our Las Vegas art project (Instagram: @ourlasvegas). Her “Daily Frame” shots of Valley life are sharp, perfectly balanced and vivid—and every one of them was taken with the camera Bruner had in her pocket. Here are her tips for using yours well.
• Clean your lens.“Phone cameras spend a lot of time being handled, so [the lenses] tend to collect a lot of goop.”
• Don’t be afraid to edit photos.“The native editors on phone cameras are a good start, and Instagram has some very powerful tools aside from its filters. The simplest one is Lux, which brightens darks and darkens brights, and it’s scalable so you can dial in some goodness.”
• Get the apps.“There are many fine photo-editing apps, and my current favorite for more involved things is Snapseed, which is one of the few that one can use to dodge and burn, the Brush feature in the toolbox. The apps I use most often are Instagram, Hipstamatic and Snapseed, and there’s another called Darkroom that does some nice cinematic looks.”
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