You don’t need to fork out on a top of the range camera to be able to take professional looking photos of your family. It can be tempting; after all, you never want to forget those special memories you’ve made. However, you can take some awesome pictures just using your phone, providing you use the advice here! Take a look and soon enough, you could be taking amazing pictures of your family!
- Learn More About Lighting
Lighting is one of the most important aspects, if not the most important aspect, of taking professional looking pictures. It doesn’t matter what device you’re using: if your lighting is off, it simply isn’t going to look the way you want it to look. It’s often best to take pictures of your family in natural light, but overcast days are actually best. If it’s too bright, it could ruin the look of the picture and cast ugly shadows across your family. If you want to take pictures indoors, make sure you do it so that the light source is in front of you all. You could always buy a small lamp or light especially for taking pictures indoors if you want to get serious about taking great pictures.
- Capture Your Family’s Personality
Don’t forget to capture your family’s personality in the pictures you take. Don’t have them sit rigid, smiling, and dead behind the eyes for each picture. Catch them when they are laughing, playing, and being themselves! It’ll make your pictures look that much better and far more authentic. Crack a joke and make them genuinely laugh when you take pictures and you’ll be able to capture each individual spark.
- Use Gridlines To Straighten Things Out
When taking the shots using your phone, use the gridlines. Gridlines will help you to keep your pictures straight, and they’ll also help you to use ‘the rule of thirds’ easily. This ensures balance in your photos. You can get creative with the rule of thirds if you want to – you can see how artists use it in their pieces! You can straighten your picture up afterwards if you need to, so this isn’t such a big deal. However, it’s always such a satisfying feeling to create a perfect image without needing to adjust it in any way!
- Try An Image Editing App
Image editing apps are far better than your basic filters. You can then experiment with your editing style until you find a unique aesthetic. Your ultimate goal could be to have people recognize that a photo is yours just by looking at one of them!
Just remember to avoid over editing your pictures. It’s often easy to do this because of the small size of your phone screen, which is why you should be vigilant. Too much editing and too many filters will always make your pictures worse – less is always more. Make sure you know how to download photos from iCloud so that you can see them on a larger screen, such as your computer, or even your iPad. This can give you a better idea of how your editing is going and whether you need to make any tweaks.
- Set Your Camera’s Focus
Usually, the phone cameras of today will automatically focus on the foreground of your frame. However, the subject of your picture won’t be obvious in every single photo. You can simply tap where you would like your camera to sharpen the view, ensuring your subject is correct and that your picture turns out perfectly.
- Embrace Negative Space
Negative space is the area between the subjects of an image. Using negative space correctly could actually take your picture from ok to amazing! The subject often stands out more when you use more negative space in your pictures, and it can even get a much stronger reaction from the person viewing it. Negative space in your case could be a big blue sky, an empty field, a huge wall, a body of water, or something similar.
Taking professional looking family photos using your phone is entirely possible. Take your time, play with lighting, angles, and settings, and just have fun. Sooner or later, you’ll find that you’re more than capable of taking pictures that you want to print out and frame – and you might even find that other members of the family ask you to do the same. If you have any advice of your own, leave it in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!
