Posted by Aimee Cozza on December 12th, 2022In the age of social media, visual elements are key to promoting your brand, your services, and your business. No matter what you’re selling, making, or doing, brushing up on your skills when it comes to capturing these things with your cell phone camera. You don’t need to be toting around a professional DSLR camera to get good shots of your work, but you do need to keep in mind some key elements of good photography when passing along these photographs to your marketing department!
#1 Ensure adequate lighting
Good lighting is the key to any good photograph. Photographers envy the sun’s powers and often try to emulate natural lighting whenever possible. That means don’t shoot in a dimly lit building and expect stellar shots. If you have something to shoot and don’t have a well-lit home, take your item outside! The sunlight will provide more than adequate lighting to take a good, crisp shot of your product or person.
#2 Shoot from the viewpoint of the object or person
If you’re taking a photo of something smaller than you, unless you want to show the top of the object, get closer to the ground. You want to get on the same level as your subject whether it’s an object, an animal, or a person, to ensure that you’re not taking distorted shots. If your object is small and you’re struggling to get on the right level with it, try turning your phone upside down, or try elevating the object by placing it on stairs, a rock, or a table so you can take photos directly across from it.
#3 Be mindful of the aspect ratio you’re shooting in
If your object is long or appears in a horizontal fashion, you shouldn’t be shooting in portrait. Turn your phone and shoot landscape orientation! With cell phone cameras prevalent in today’s society, everyone thinks that the default option of holding your phone vertically to take a photo or video is the best in every situation to take a quick snapshot. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Instead, you end up with poorly cropped objects or people crammed together to fit the vertical space. Unless the photo or video is specifically for social media stories or posts, then vertical photography is likely not your go-to.
#4 Take more than one photo
Too often, clients share with us one single, solitary photo and ask us to share it on their blog, in an email, or on social media, and it’s often that these solitary photos could have been better – even marginally so – if the photographer had taken at least one more shot. Taking more than one shot can ensure that you capture different angles, different aspect ratios, and even account for an unintentional blur. We would much rather prefer to have a variety of photos of the same subject sent to us to share so we can pick the best out of them all rather than one poorly framed, poorly lit, poorly oriented photo!
Hopefully, these tips will help you improve your photography A game even if you’ve never taken a professional level photograph in your life. Got any additional photography tips to share? Let us know in the comments!
