Take A Good Interior Picture With Your Phone
Blog entry
21st July
First of all, it bears to mention that not all phone cameras are created equal. So please bear this in mind when you decide to start using your phone as your main camera.
As a photographer myself, using your phone is great for that quick and fast picture for social media or to share. I do believe that using an SLR camera will help and will enable you to take full control compared to a phone camera.
Phone cameras do have some exceptional aspects like HDR and portrait mode, plus others that I have not listed. You can also purchase or download free apps to help you use your phone camera more effectively.
As the phone processes the lighting and exposure you do need to try and keep to these eight options when using your camera to take a photo of an interior scene:
Use natural light
Clean your lens, and look after your phone camera.
Shoot straight
Lock & focus exposure
Shoot lower & Zoom in
Use a phone tripod
Edit your photos
Turn off the on-camera flash
Use natural light
Make sure that you shut off or turn off any artificial lighting as it is better to have only one light source and this is the natural lighting flooding in via the windows. This shows the colours of the interior more clearly to the visual eye.
Clean your lens, and look after your phone camera.
It is really important to have a clean lens, with no food marks or scratches, as these will affect the final image taken.
Shoot straight
This is virtual and you need to make sure that you keep your camera straight so that your vertical lines are straight and have your camera facing toward what you wish to photograph. Remember you are documenting a section of a room or a personalised detail, angles will not make this look realistic. You are capturing what you see in front of you for others to admire too.
Key tip - use the grid option on your camera phone app.
This is how to set your grid up on your iPhone:
Click on settings
Find the camera
Click on grid
When you take a picture the grid will be visible.
Once you have set up your camera phone with the grids you can use the grid to align your vertical lines for each photograph you take.
Lock & focus exposure
With any camera phone, you will have a yellow square for the iPhone or a blue circle for the android phone. You can move these shapes and press these upon a focus point. Once you have pressed this focus point the camera figures the exposure for you and with an iPhone if you double click on the yellow square it will lock focus & exposure.
Key tip - shot the images a little bit underexposed, because you can not bring back detail if the images are overexposed. Consider this tip when positioning the focus/exposure point.
Shoot lower & Zoom in
Okay, this mainly refers to where you hold the camera to the scene.
Viewpoint is a photographic composition technique where a photographer can shoot high, lower, or upwards. When photographing an interior you want to make the room look larger so shoot from your middle, which means you might bend towards if you are holding your phone or have the tripod at the height of your belly button.
The zoom-in is simple, move your feet closer to what you are photographing, do not use the zoom-in option, as you will lose detail.
Use a phone tripod
If you have a tripod you can set your phone camera with the grids in line with the vertical lines per room and at the middle point height. Then you can simply move the phone and tripod from room to room.
Edit your photos
As you have taken underexposed images you will need to edit these images so that you have perfect highlights and shadows.
There are many different ways to edit your images with a variety of apps.
Lightroom Adobe is a good app, as you can set your own presents so that each time you take an image you use a set editing process, which will show style and consistency throughout your images.
Or you may wish to try any of these:
VSCOcam - https://vsco.co/ with this app you can share your videos or photos. This app offers ways to creatively edit your photos and videos.
FILMBORN - take a read of this article about this app and the app is free - https://www.slrlounge.com/filmborn-full-review-of-mastin-labs-new-photography-app/
Turn off the on-camera flash
Make a point when photographing the interior room, that your on-camera flash is turned off. The flash is not required as I said earlier in this blog, you want to have only one light source and this is natural light.
After reading this blog you should have learned about how to now take better quality interior photographs. This blog has been written on behalf of RKB DESIGN STUDIO LTD, as Rupinder Kaur asked for this blog subject so that she could photograph the wonderful interior designs that she creates for her clients.
If you are interested in what RKB Design offer then follow this link to her website - https://rkbdesignstudio.com/
Thank you, Rupinder for this great blog suggestion.
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