Mobile Photography – Tip Of The Day – Number 33

Welcome to another brand new section from your favourite mobile photography website and one of the most popular in the world. Today, we’re publishing our 33rd Mobile Photography/Art Tip Of The Day to our brand new section of the site.

Every day we will publish a short quick tip to help you with your mobile photography, this may be related to editing your image, capturing your image, printing your image, all manner of things, across the complete photographic and art mobile genre – we’ll be featuring great mobile street photography tips, great blending tips, great cloning tips, we will cover it all from some of the greatest mobile photographers and artists in the world.

We’ll also have a widget in our right hand column, displaying the Tip of The Day every day, just click on that and you will be taken to our tip of  the Day archive.

We are delighted to publish our 33rd Tip Of The Day today, this time by our wonderful Columnist Cindy Patrick. Cindy writes the Vision and Voice Column and you can find that here.

Cindy has written a wonderful Tip today, regarding light, the mainstay of photography and crucially important with mobile photography. Don’t miss it…(foreword by Joanne Carter)

“You’ll often hear photographers talk about the importance of looking for and finding “good light.” But what is good light?

Landscape photographers are fond of defining good light as being the “golden hour” or “magic hour” which is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day. Typically, this is the time of day when lighting is softer and more diffuse. Shadows are relatively non-existent when the sun is below the horizon because the light is more indirect. So early morning and late afternoon usually provide us with what is considered “good light.”

Well, that is all well and good except if you are a wedding photographer like me! I am often out photographing at high noon or at various times of day when the light is far from ideal. This is often the case for mobile photographers as well, when we are out at all times of the day, in sub-optimal lighting conditions, attempting to capture high-quality photos with our iPhones.

So what do you do? Here is my tip, which I use just about every weekend with my professional photography, and with my day-to-day iPhone photography as well.

Always put your subject between yourself and the sun. In other words, you should look for any opportunity to backlight your subject. There are two tricks to making this work and avoiding lens flare or washed-out looking photos. First, you must shield yourself (or more specifically, shield your camera lens) from the sun’s rays. Second, make sure your subject is positioned against a dark background (anything darker than the sky or the subject itself will usually do, but the darker the better.)

In this photo, captured with my iPhone (using Hipstamatic) at mid-day, I first positioned the couple with the sun behind them against a dark background. I made sure to block the sun’s rays from hitting my lens by positioning myself and my iPhone behind a nearby tree. The result is a subject that is beautifully lit! Notice the gorgeous rim-lighting achieved with this technique. This is something I strive for with my outdoor portraiture.

So, good lighting can be found at any time of day if you remember this one tip! It takes a bit of practice, but is well worth the results! ”