5 ways to take professional photos on your phone

Ok so this all started with me experimenting to see what tips would help people take professional looking photos of their babies on their phones.

I had a wonderful friend round a while back with her adorable little baby & used all the tricks & tips that I do in sessions, taking the shot with both my professional camera & then replicating the shots with my phone.

I was so optimistic, but in all brutal honesty I couldn’t do it.

But don’t despair, even though the photos on my phone didn’t come close to my usual images, they were still really lovely & I discovered some images that actually a phone would be perfect for.

So I’ve compiled my top 5 tips for taking fab photos of your little ones at home with your phone & I thought it could be a lovely thing for you to do while we’re all staying in.

It takes 2

My first & probably most important tip is don’t try it on your own, it’s so, so much harder. When you have someone else to help, that’s when you’ll be able to capture the genuine expressions. Babies will generally look quite confused, or stare intently at a phone or camera, they’re intrigued.

So to capture those gorgeous giggles & smiles, have someone else there entertaining your little one & then you’re free to capture all of the sweet expressions.

Simple

You don’t need a studio, or perfect white room to create more professional looking images. The best place to start is on a bed, ideally with plain white bedding so that the focus of the image is on baby.

If your bed is in a room with rubbish light then why not create a fake bed setting by simply using the bedding against a wall in whichever room you have that has the prettiest light.

Position

This is how I plan most of the images in my sessions, it means you can capture babies genuine expressions while filling their eyes with light & capturing all of the beautiful details.

So I have baby parallel to the window, then have ‘the entertainer’ positioned by the window (but not blocking it, they need to be at the edge of the window) & then you’re positioned to the other side of baby, shooting from the shadows.

Lighting

Lighting is key to photography & with my camera I find the lovely contrast of light in my studio works perfectly. However, a phone camera really struggles with this.

The phone camera can only capture extremes, so it finds it hard to handle contrast & tends to err on the side of darkening the image.

The best light for a phone camera is actually outside with brighter light, the contrast of light indoors can be a challenge for a phone camera.

Edit

Even though the photos I took on my phone were dark, when I applied my usual editing workflow in Photoshop I was actually pretty pleased with the final image.

The challenge of course is that unless you’re a photographer or professional photo editor, then you’re unlikely to know your way around Photoshop or Lightroom.

But there are loads of apps out there that are pretty easy to get used to & I’ll go through my favourite 2 in a moment, but it’s worth noting first that editing in black & white is much, much easier.

There are some brilliant filters that you apply with one click on your phone & the result look really good. This image for example was a super simple, one click black and white filter in the ColorStory app (the filter is in the B&W bundle & is called Audrey).

Now for my favourite 2 phone editing apps, first for Colorstory that I mentioned above. It’s such an easy app to use & there are hundreds of filters to try at the tap of a finger.

The first thing I found useful in the app was to go into the bit called “curves” click in the middle of the line & then drag it up a bit to brighten the image.

In then went into “Filters” & the one called “Chroma” I felt worked best, but there were a few that I was pretty impressed with.

My other favourite app for editing on your phone is the Photoshop app, it takes a bit of playing to get used to but there are loads of snazzy features. But for this edit I just applied the “VignetteBlue” filter & lowered the opacity to taste.