Phone Photography 101

Hi, this is Don Orkoskey of WDO Photography, and this is my Phone Photography 101 presentation that was given to the Penn Hills Library. I'm super thankful for the Penn Hills Library for having me out and, and having me do this presentation. I do teach phone photography classes, and in addition to that, you can follow me and watch this on YouTube if you're not already, and like and subscribe to my YouTube. So we're going to talk about phone photography basics, and there are really 2 buckets that that stuff falls into. The first one is the technical aspects of photography, and the second is the more artistic or aesthetic aspects. Speaking of the technical aspects, we're going to talk about exposure, focus, and the tools that we can use to technically change or hopefully improve our photography. So what is exposure? Exposure just Means brightness, right? It's how bright our photo is. Without light, there's no photography, right? So we have some existing amount of light, whether that's the sun or a different light source. There's some amount of light. If we want to create a photo with that, then we need to capture it in our phone's sensor over a period of time, which is typically a fraction of a second. So the sensitivity of our sensor, the time we allow that light to come in and strike the sensor, and the volume of that light that's coming in are all factors into how bright our photo ends up being. More practically, let's talk about how to change our exposure. If a photo is too bright or too dark, we can change that brightness. With an iPhone, you can just press on the screen where you want to focus the picture and then drag up and down near that line. You don't have to be right on that line, but near that line that has the little sun icon or light icon in it. If you drag up, it gets brighter. If you drag down, it gets darker. On Android phones, they usually still have this process, but it varies in terms of how you do it. Samsung is a very popular brand of Android phones, and with Samsung, you have to press for a longer period of time on the screen, and it'll bring up a circle that has a little lock on it. And then you drag side to side to change that brightness. The Google Pixel phones, I believe, actually have a brightness bar that is just always there on the side, which makes it handy. But again, there are so many Android phones out there. You just kind of have to look up how to change the exposure on such and such Android phone. But what are we changing? Well, again, time, volume, and sensitivity are the 3 variables that affect our exposure. So when we change our exposure, we're adjusting the time and the sensitivity. We're not really adjusting the volume because the size of the hole in our lens that the light comes in through is fixed. We can't make it bigger or smaller. We can add light, right? Or we can subtract light, but we can't affect it just within our phone's camera. So whereas we can affect the time and the sensitivity. So if we're adding brightness, we're doing so by adding time. We're using a longer amount of time or adding sensitivity, and both of these things have trade-offs. The more time we add, the more likely we are to have things move and therefore appear blurry. The more sensitivity we add, the more we can end up with noisy or grainy sort of staticky As well as flat-looking photos, which are generally uglier than they would be if there were more light. The more time we add, the brighter our photo will be. However, we can end up with one of 2 types of blurriness as a result. And so if we look at our 2 example pictures, we have this wood duck that's perfectly frozen in time, and you can see some water droplets. You know, around it that are just frozen there. And we have a tricolor heron below there, which is very much in motion. So motion blur happens when our subject is moving and we can't freeze that motion. If you've ever taken a photo of a pet with zoomies or a toddler with zoomies running around inside where there's not much light, you know, and everything's a blur, that is motion blur. There's just Not enough light that our phone is saying, I need enough time to bring this up to the level of brightness that you want. If things are moving, they're going to be blurry. Motion blur can be useful. We can track our subject's movements. You may have seen especially like race car photos that show the car is, you know, perfectly sharp and in focus, but everything else has got these sort of lines of motion, right? Which is Really cool. It's not easy to do. It's one thing with a race car that's off in the distance. It's another thing with a toddler. That is, it's a very cool effect, but you know, again, it takes a lot of work. You can really see with this tricolored heron that that's what I was trying to do, but it was moving a little bit upwards. So its head is, is not perfectly sharp. The other type of blur we can have is called camera shake. This is where everything ends up being blurry because we are moving our phone. We're moving the camera. And camera shake is generally not useful. So let's talk about our sensitivity. If we don't have enough light coming in and we need to increase that brightness, we can increase our sensitivity, sort of. What we're actually doing is we're amplifying the signal. So there's less light. Light is information that the photo is built out of, right? And when we increase that signal, we boost that signal. We also are boosting any noise that's there. The end result is that our photos lose contrast. So darker areas don't really have the same level of darkness as they would. Bright areas are, you know, maybe not as bright as they otherwise would be. And we lose color contrast. So colors are more subdued. We lose that color saturation and color contrast. So the colors aren't very different from each other. And we can see that noise. So if you look, it just looks very staticky, right? Especially you can kind of see, especially in the dark areas where it's just kind of staticky looking. The only way to combat that is to add more light to the scene, which, you know, isn't always possible. Let's talk about focus next. Focus is what is sharp in our photos. Our phone cameras allow us to just press on the area in the picture that we want it to focus on, and it will hopefully get it in focus. Our phones also have a lot of what we call depth of field, which is the amount of stuff in front of and behind what we focus on that appears to be in focus or that appears sharp. If we look at this picture here, the woman holding her phone up whose elbow is on the barricade there, she's Sharp. She's in focus. And the guy that is behind her from our point of view, not the guy to the right of her that is physically behind her, but our point of view behind her, the guy in the black hoodie, he is still pretty sharp, but a little bit less. And as we go backwards, there's the guy who's scratching his head who's less sharp. And then the, the tent that's behind them. That is significantly less sharp, and likewise, if we come forward, there's not a whole lot of stuff in front of her. But the barricade that is towards the right of the picture, in front of well, that guy has a black hoodie as well. The first guy I was talking about is the guy that doesn't have a hat on, but the guy with the hat on and the black hoodie, the barricade that's in front of him, the edge of it there is just starting to get soft. But it's this slow, gradual. Thing, which brings me to portrait mode. Portrait mode is trying to mimic a shallow depth of field or a very short depth of field, but because of some of the mathy things in our phone, mostly to do with the size of our camera sensor, there's not a good way to actually create a shallow depth of field other than to be very close to what you're photographing. So if you're photographing like a small flower, then the amount of stuff in focus behind it will be pretty small if you're, you know, if you're like an inch away. But when we're photographing something like a person and we want that out-of-focus blurry background, most phones today have portrait mode, which allow us to mimic that. They're not exactly perfect. What they're doing is taking an out-of-focus picture And an in-focus picture and merging the two together. There's no gradual change there, which is why they can be problematic. Also, they're cutting out what they believe to be the subject. And if they're wrong, let's say, um, somebody has their arms or has their hands on their hips with their elbows sticking out. That space that's in between their body and their elbows, that little triangle there. A lot of times portrait mode misses that and doesn't put that stuff that's inside of that little triangle out of focus. Another problem as a bald guy, I can tell you, if I let my hair grow out a little bit on the sides, then it really struggles with where my head ends and where that hair is. And it just doesn't look very natural. So that said, it's a very useful tool when it works well. Speaking of tools, let's talk about tools and accessories we can add to our phones to help improve our photography. Probably the biggest add-on that we can invest in is something like a tripod. You may have heard of tripods. You know, they have 3 legs and the camera sits on top of it. Monopods you might not be as familiar with, and gimbals too you may not be familiar with. All of these though add stabilization, and the gimbals allow for some fluid motion, and they're really good for video. Gimbals are things that allow you to hold, hold a camera inside of the gimbal and not have motion show up as much, whereas tripods sits either on a desk or on the floor and doesn't move itself. Monopods are like a one-legged tripod. You may have seen those for like sports photography. If you've watched sports, you see the guys on the sideline with the gigantic lenses and the sticks sticking out of them, that's the monopod. Monopods are helpful, but again, they're mostly used for having, you know, long lenses. That being said, we can add lenses to our phones, which allows us to change our focal length. That is the amount of stuff that we are seeing in our photos. So there's wide-angle lenses show you a lot of stuff, right? They're even to the degree of what are called fisheye lenses that show you like a 180-degree view. There are telephoto lenses that zoom in on things that are far away, essentially. So oftentimes people call those telephoto lenses zoom lenses. That's not technically correct because you can have a wide-angle zoom lens. Zoom just means that it's able to change that focal length. And when it comes to our phones, there are some that, that allow that, but, um, some zoom lenses for our phones, but they're, they're not common. And with anything, the more you spend on something like add-on lenses for your phone, the nicer they will be, generally speaking. One other thing in terms of the lenses is that there are different ways to attach them. So there are very commonly clips that work. They're like spring-loaded, kind of like bag clips or Like, um, you know, like a hair clip even, you know, or clothespin where, you know, they're spring-loaded. And so they, they go, uh, the lens itself clicks on or clips onto the back of the phone where the camera is. And then there's a front piece that will basically sit on your screen. The problem with those is they oftentimes will activate the screen. So they're basically useless. Not all of them, and it depends on the phone, but they, they can be problematic. So just putting that out there. There are also phone cases that you can add the, you know, that hold lenses, but those are obviously very specific to the, that model of phone, right? And the third one is kind of the in-between, which is something that will clip onto the sides. Like it'll clamp basically onto both sides of the phone, allows you to move that lens into place up and down or side to side. So that it is covering your camera's lens. And those I think are the best. They're not that, that expensive in the grand scheme of things. And they're super helpful for, again, changing what we want to photograph. There are also different filters. So they filter light in different ways. You can have colored filters. There's special effects filters that will make little starbursts. There are ones that are like kaleidoscope filters and different things like that. There's also macro filters and there are macro lenses. Macro just means life-size, 1 to 1. So this photo of my cat's eye, that's Glasha's eye, was taken with a macro lens. So again, they come in either lenses or filters. And then there are add-on lights which allow us to add some additional light. So there are little LED panels that you can clip on, and there are ring lights where the phone clips in the middle of those. Those you see a lot for folks that are doing Blogging and vlogging, and they tend to be attached to a tripod essentially. Now let's jump into the artistic side of photography or the aesthetics, which is how we make our photos visually pleasing or at the very least interesting, right? Because some things are interesting but not necessarily pretty. So we're going to talk now about how we do that. And we're going to start by talking about framing. Then about composition, and then about the principles of design. So let's jump right on in. Framing is really important because if you are in a space where you can do this, I encourage you to do so. So stare straight ahead and put your arms out, um, straight from, straight out from your shoulders. Turn your palms towards where you're looking and start wiggling your fingers and just move your arms. back and forth a little bit while keeping your eyes facing perfectly straight ahead. And you'll notice that you start to see those fingers in your periphery wiggling, but then they disappear when you go backwards and then they reappear again. But they're kind of, you know, they're not stuff that you're really paying much attention to. And that's because they're outside of our frame of vision. There's, there's not an edge there, right? We just— there's no blackness, there's no frame, there's just nothingness beyond there, right? Which is why if something is moving in our periphery or something grabs our attention there, we tend to look in that direction. We move our eyes, we move our head, we move our bodies. We are very aware of our subject. But in photography and videography, we don't have that ability to move, to shift that, right? So what we see within the frame is what is trapped within that frame. So it's important to understand what is there. Does it belong? Is there something that's missing, right? The fact that we move our eyes to see what we're focused on is one reason that things like photobombing became a thing. It was very easy to, you know, for somebody to stand in the background and make a funny face if the person taking the picture is so focused on the person that they're photographing, right? Or the object that they're photographing. So being aware of everything that's happening within that frame, because again, it's not naturally how our brains work, it goes a long way to helping improve your photography. So let's talk about composition. Composition is how we arrange elements in our photos. And if you think back to language composition classes where, you know, you were taught sentence structure, our sentence— sentences are nouns, and those nouns are doing an action, which is a verb. And we can have things that describe both the noun and the verb, right? Adverbs and adjectives. We can have other objects in our sentence, right? How we put that together so that we're communicating that information is composition, right? It's how we compose those sentences, which then become paragraphs and then become whole stories. When learning visual composition, which again is very similar to language composition, it's really important to first be patient with yourself. A lot of times if we're taking pictures, we're somewhere where there's something interesting happening. We're often with other people, and those other people might just want to move on. They want to keep going, right? So you may feel pressured, or if they're the subject of the photo, they might just be like, just take the picture, right? They don't, they don't want to wait for you to get it right. But if you are able to, then take your time, be patient, look for what it is that you're photographing and think about what you're trying to say about that subject. So the first thing we have to do other than being patient is to identify what that subject is, right? Once we've identified that subject, it's helpful to say what it is to yourself. A charcuterie board, right? In the case of this photo here. So identify what that subject is and say it to yourself. You don't have to say it out loud, but say it to yourself so that your brain registers, okay, this is the subject. Then we want to check that frame, right? Framing. We want to look all around. Is there anything in here that doesn't belong? Is there something missing that should be there? We want to set our focus. So remember, press on the screen. Then we're going to set our exposure. We're going to drag up and down or side to side, whichever way changes the brightness. If we think that we need to change it, then it's really helpful to think about how somebody looking at this picture once it's taken, how they will travel around the picture. So if you close your eyes and open them, see what you're first drawn to and think about what you know where it is, and then where do your eyes go next? Right? How do you look around and really take in this image? Because unlike a written story where things are You know, follow those rules of composition, whereas in English things are read left to right, top to bottom, right? A photograph doesn't work that way. Our eyes tend to be drawn to brighter spots, especially if there's high contrast there. So it would be natural to look at this picture and see these plates because they're very bright, but there's also a lot of dark areas around them, or even this little Cup of mustard or butter, or I honestly don't know what it is that's in the very front there that has that little blue stripe, right? It's very bright. It's close to us. It's taking up quite a bit of, of room in the picture, and there's good contrast there. Those areas are where our eyes are likely to start. And then we're going to travel around them, depending on which one of those we start out. We might travel down the bread, uh, that's towards the front there, and then look up towards the meats and cheeses and Go back through the charcuterie board, see the chair rail, go up towards the picture that's there, come back down by the plates, come around the table because it's kind of got this circular top to it, right? Maybe get distracted by the leg of the table and that little bit of light that's kind of in the middle underneath there, and before coming back up and maybe moving on to the next picture. Think about that because it's important to understand what the viewer is seeing. If they are going to spend the time to understand what we're saying with this picture and to take it in and absorb the entire story, or if they're just going to read the headline and move on. The next thing that we can do is look for the design principles that we are using and employing and see if they're helping to tell that story or if they're detracting from the story. So what are design principles? They're essentially a visual shorthand. They invoke a widely understood, almost always culturally shared meaning or emotion. They provide ways for us to arrange our elements, to compose our elements, and to add context or additional properties that people who have a shared lived experience can understand when it comes to the story we're telling. If we look at this picture, Of this stream, you know, there's perspective there, right? It goes back along the shoreline there. There's also this sort of triangular bit of the sky coming down, pointing towards that spot in the distance. So we're really drawn by these sort of big triangular shapes towards that back area there. But then we bounce back and forth because we've got The bright water that's in the front, this was taken with a long exposure. That is a lot of time. So the water is very smooth looking. As a result, we also see like the brightness on the tops of these rocks, right? So we kind of bounce back and forth between those things, right? And so it's important to think about what is the message here? What are we trying to say? And that doesn't have to be some profound earth-shattering thing. It can be, hey, look at this, you know, Pretty creek. And it doesn't have to be some mind-blowing thing that no one's ever thought of before, right? Because, you know, we take millions of pictures. I'm just going to go over a couple of design principles just to save time, but my favorite by far is movement. And like a lot of these, movement can be implied or it can be explicit. We can understand that action is happening. So like this larger picture to the top here is an osprey. They fly. We know that they don't just hover in the air like that, right? They actually have to flap their wings and they have to move forward. Even though it's frozen there, that movement is implied. If you take a picture of someone jumping in the air, we know people don't hover. There's implied motion there. But there's also explicit motion we can show, and explicit motion can show chaos or madness. You know, it can really aid that story that we're telling by— Just adding that level of activity and action to it. Color theory is incredibly complex and dense as a subject. Color has deep psychological and cultural meanings. In the West, like in the US, white is the color of wedding dresses because it symbolizes purity, right? Whereas in places like, I believe, I believe most of China, white is a color of death or funerals, right? So Very different meanings, right? So there are cultural meanings. So we have to understand who we're making things for, who our audiences are, in order to know that they are going to understand what we're saying. Just like with language, right? We know that someone has to speak or read our language if we're going to give them the information we're trying to give them. But color has such deep meanings because it can be very personal, right? We have favorite colors and there are colors that we don't like. Maybe, you know, a color reminds us of our ex, so our stomach turns every time we see it, right? We also associate different emotions with color, you know, blue being sad, you're feeling blue, right? Red is associated with anger and with passion. Green is associated with envy, but it's also associated with health, right? So All of these things are powerful tools that we can use to reinforce the story that we're telling in our photos, right? And the amount of saturation matters. The amount of color contrast and in the amount of visual space that color takes up matters, right? We also can create monochromatic, that is photos that are one color, or in the case of black and white photos, which are monochromatic, they lack color, right? They're just black and white. We can use contrasting colors. So contrasting colors, as you've seen in this presentation, blue and orange are my favorite contrasting colors. Cool colors, cool colors being blue, green, and purple, recede or feel like they're falling away from us. They go backwards, even in 2D artwork, right? So whereas warm colors come towards us. So those are your reds and orange and yellow. So if we combine the colors that are opposite on the color wheel, so yellow and purple, red and green, orange and blue, if we combine those, those sets, we create an extra sense of depth in our pictures, which is really interesting and, and super helpful. But again, we have to understand that there are different meanings people can have. We associate sports teams with colors, especially complementary colors because complementary colors look good together. You know, looking at this presentation, you might think I'm a fan of the Denver Broncos American football team. I'm not an American football fan. So no, I'm not a fan of that team. But those are the colors that they use, right? So if you see black and gold, you know, that reminds you of Pittsburgh sports teams, right? Because they all fall into that set of colors, right? We can really use those not so much as the primary explainer, but we can use those colors to reinforce what we're saying. So if what we're talking about is somebody being angry, then their face being red, that is going to reinforce that, right? If we're taking a picture of a single tree at the top of a hill in wintertime, just making it a little bluer. Mm-hmm. Kind of gives us that sense of isolation and cold. Color is fascinating and very fun to use. And the final design principle I'm going to talk about today, and again, there are so many others. If you Google them, you'll find line and shape and balance and rhythm and repetition and all these other different design principles. But just for the sake of time, I want to keep this shorter. Contrast is the last one I'm going to talk about. Contrast is the difference between black and white. Generally, we think of That's called tonal contrast. But contrast is also essentially comparing opposites, right? Or juxtaposition. In photography, it often comes down to black and white, right? That is not the only way we can use contrast. We can show young and old, short and tall, war and peace, right? We can show all of these things that are in contrast, which really helps drive The message home, especially if we're trying to draw attention to one of those things. So if we show it in comparison to something else, it makes it seem bigger or smaller. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you doing so, and I want to once again thank the Pen Hills Library for asking me to do this. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please like and subscribe. If you're watching this somewhere else, feel free to like and subscribe. Visit me. at wdo-photo.com to sign up for my monthly newsletter and to read a bunch of articles that help you with phone photography and photography of a variety of types— nature and wildlife, professional photography, all sorts of stuff. I've got lots of, lots of information out there and a bunch of free resources, so please, uh, please check that out and I will see you next time, and thank you once again for watching. Bye-bye.