Today’s mobile phones are of sufficient quality to replace, to a certain extent, digital cameras. Many times in meetings with friends or small trips we don’t take the camera because it is more of a hindrance than a benefit, but the photos we take with the mobile phone don’t look as good as they could. We are going to talk about different tricks to take good photos with a mobile phone.

Objectives:

To learn how to correctly use the camera settings of your mobile phone.
To learn focusing and positioning tricks to take better pictures.

Duration of the session: 1 hour and 30 minutes

Number of participants: min. 5 max. 15

Materials:

Mobile phone
Internet connection

Description:

The facilitator will start by giving some basic tips before starting to take photos:

Considering that the phone is always being handled, the lens gets dirty easily and needs to be cleaned just as often. It is best to use a special chamois, but with a cotton T-shirt and a lot of care we can clean it just as well.
It is best to work in natural light whenever possible, even if you are not outdoors.
The LED flash that is built into most mobiles produces a harsh light that casts harsh shadows and is rarely useful, so avoid using it if possible.

Now, after the tips, you will start working on exercises to train your photographic skills.

Composition

Participants must photograph the same scene at different focal lengths.

Colour

Find a scene with a contrast between two complementary colours. Take a photograph with warm colours and another with cold colours.

Lighting

Illuminate the same object from different directions and take a photograph of each of these situations.

Approach

Take different portraits, at different distances from the model to find the perfect blur.

Creativity

Be creative, go into the manual settings and change the parameters. Do a lot of testing and find the settings that suit you best.

Once participants have completed all the exercises, we will show them different applications they can use to edit their photos.

SnapSeed

This app has so many options and tools, and there’s so much you can do with it, that it can tend to get a bit confusing if you don’t know what you want to achieve with your editing, and you end up over-editing the photo. But it gives you access to change and edit a lot of parameters, to play a lot with the photo.

First, you access the app and click in the centre to choose the image you want to edit.

2. Once you have the image in the app you can start editing, the first options you see in the panel below are filters that you can use to easily modify the colour of the image.

3. You can edit the image with all these tools, the idea is to experiment and investigate. Change the photo and play with it.

4. An example of what they can do is to crop and resize the image. They can also increase and decrease the brightness and many other things.

5. You can also add old film effects or give it an old camera look with different effects. All these options appear in the bottom toolbar.

6. Finally in the save section we can export the image or share it.

2. Afterlight

It has traditional editing tools, and lots of filters, but what it is most often used for is to add light filters to photos. You can also do other things with it like double exposure, add textures (scratches, dust, etc.) to give an old style to the photos, and many other things.

We will give them some time to select one of the applications and play around with it. After editing the photos, we will upload them to a shared drive folder to see the results of all the companies.

First, you access the application and click on one of the two options depending on whether you want to take the photo on the spot or choose one from the gallery

2. With the photo selected, the first thing we see is the toolbar at the bottom, which we can use to edit and modify the image.

3. Among the different options that the app gives us are to modify the brightness, contrast, the colour of the image…

4. They can also use filters that modify the brightness, style and tones of the image.

5. With this application you can also give it a different look like an old camera or put frames of various shapes.

Expected outcomes:

At the end of the activity participants will be able to:

Have learned tips on how to take better photos with a mobile phone.
Gained knowledge about focus, composition, light and colour when taking photos.
Learned how to use photo editing tools.