Today’s smartphones and tablets include all of the tools necessary to make visually appealing images and are the ideal method to begin exploring photography.

1. Application of the camera

Today’s camera applications include hundreds of useful features that can significantly improve your photography – but only if you know where to look. Allow yourself a half-hour to sit down with your app. Tap on every button you’ve never touched before to discover what they do. Among the options you may discover are HDR mode (for adding detail to landscape photographs), macro mode (for photographing close-up items), and portrait mode (for blurring out the background of people and object photos).

2. Camera Aperture

Taking control of your phone’s or tablet’s focusing is a surprisingly simple technique to shoot more intriguing images. Simply tap on the part of the image that you wish to focus on. Consider the images below to get a sense of what this would look like.

3. Appropriate Exposure

You may have just observed a small slider appear next to the location where you tapped to concentrate. This slider is used to modify the image’s exposure (brightness) prior to taking the snapshot. This strategy is especially handy if you’re photographing landscapes at an unusually bright or dark time of day. Because cameras frequently struggle to strike a balance between illuminating the sky and the ground, it’s advantageous to be able to choose the exposure that looks best to you.

As a general rule, it is usually preferable to shoot a photograph with proper exposure than to alter it later with editing.

4. Camera Aperture

Not only is a phone/tablet convenient to carry about, but the lenses are typically positioned at the top or corners of the device, allowing for some unique angles that are tough to accomplish with larger cameras. Turn your gadget on its side or upside down to bring the camera closer to your topic.

5. Adequate Editing

There are numerous excellent (and free!) mobile editing applications available, but my personal faves are Snapseed and VSCO.

Snapseed is a robust, all-purpose picture editor developed by Google. It is feature-rich but yet user-friendly for newcomers, with a superb interface optimized for touchscreen use.

VSCO is first and foremost a preset (filter) application. It has a huge number of free presets that recreate the appearance and feel of the film. A good tip for this software is that you may adjust the intensity of the presets to your liking by double-tapping on your preferred preset.

Hopefully, this advice was beneficial, and best of luck in the competition. I’m excited to see your photographs!