smart phone camera tips

The adage goes the pen is mightier than the sword, but pictures have become more powerful than both.

Some teachers may lament that the smart phone and text messing are killing the English language, but the photographic image has been given new life thanks to a device you can fit in the palm of your hand. It’s made everyone more visually literate.

Instagram reported this month there are now 300 million Instagrammers and 100 million new users have been added just in the last six months. Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day.

Thanks to the iPhone and other smart phones, a generation of photography enthusiast has been born. I hope the trend will continue -- we just need to move past the sunsets and cat photos.

 Here are a few tips I swear by when I whip out my iPhone instead of my high-end professional DSLR.

• The best camera is the one you have on you and if that’s an iPhone then so be it. Just remember: treat your iPhone like a camera. Hold your phone horizontally and firmly in two hands to stabilize your camera against motion for clearer results.
• One of the many drawbacks of using any iPhone or Android device as a camera is the shutter delay from when the shutter is pushed to when the image is taken. The work-around is to be aware of the lag or take a quick burst of several images. 
•  If your smart phone has a digital zoom, turn it off or don’t use it. There is no physical zoom capability with a phone, so what you are really doing when zooming is cropping the sensor and degrading the quality of the original image.
• Filters are your friend. There are many great photo enhancing apps for your smartphone. My favourite editing app is Snapseed made by Google and its free