Tips for smart phone photography!

Most of us have some sort of smart phone, and lets face it those cameras are much better than the digital camera we had growing up( at least for me anyways).  My first digital camera was a 6mega pixel, and my iPhone camera is 8mega pixels and it records in HD.... WHAT!  Being that nice it should take super awesome pictures, so why does it seem like many of the pictures taken with a smart phone look blurry or grainy most of the time?  I know I have ( and still do at times) struggle with this.  I'm going to share some of the tips I've learned that have helped me create better pictures.

The first thing I did was to look for awesome camera apps... I've found some awesome ones, and I am constantly looking for more.  I even take my pictures with some of my apps because I have more control over my camera.  Most of the time I take my pictures with Camera+ (sorry this one is not free).  One of my favourite things about this app is the fact that you can choose focal area and the exposure area!  This way you can choose what to focus on, but if it seems like your subject is to bright, you can move your exposure area to get the perfect lighting!  However, taking indoor pictures will make it much more difficult to get a noise free image.  The biggest reason for this is because you don't really have control over the ISO and shutter (also the reason indoor pics tend to be blurry). You have to have ample light! 

Another tip, and one of my favs is to hold the shutter button down.  The picture only takes when you take your figure off that button, so hold it down, get situated and still, and once everything is still and in the frame release!  TaDa!  You have now lowered the amount of shake that is generally in a photo.  

Those are a few tips on taking the pictures, but there are lots of great editing apps out there too that can help make pictures look even better.  Camera+ has some editing filters in it, and they are decent.  I have a few that I like to use, and again I'm constantly downloading more to try.  Snapseed (this is free I believe) is a really good one along with pictapgo (not free).  I have a previous post where I show some of the edits thst can be done with pictapgo.  I also like adobe photoshop, but I use this mostly to remove noise from my images.  If a remove noise edit is used, make sure to follow up with sharpen to ensure the image does not become fuzzy.  

Well those are a few tips to improve smart phone photography!  I know there are more ways to improve even more, but I'm still working on some others, so for now this is the wisdom I have to pass on, and the app I would recommend!  I hope this was helpful, and if there are any other apps that have shown pro,is please share them in the comment section...THANKS!