Six principles that must be observed in mobile phone photography

Lead: It covers observation, operation, composition and other aspects-from fans to people, we always abide by the six principles. Here are six principles of mobile phone photography that I introduce to you. Let's go and have a look!

Familiar with several gestures

The first problem that deserves our attention is to pay attention to "gestures", which is what we call "feel". Gestures will affect the quality of our photos. Is it really that serious? We can recall some things we are familiar with, and we will find ourselves unfamiliar: to write with a pen, we must be familiar with a pen in order to achieve the best learning state; When playing the piano, if you encounter a particularly hard or soft keyboard, the quality of the pop-up music will be greatly reduced; Even when my dad cooks, he will find it difficult to grasp the heat when he meets an unfamiliar pot and spatula. Familiar gestures allow us to take pictures in a calm, stable and most comfortable way without worrying. According to our experience, we can be divided into three types to develop our familiar gestures purposefully.

Pose someone in front of the camera; Show photos

This is the most routine situation, the things to be photographed will not be fleeting, and the scene flow is relatively stable. At this point, hold the camera steady and press the shutter with your thumb. My own familiar posture is this:

When shooting horizontally, it is a camera with steady hands: the left thumb and forefinger firmly hold the mobile phone, and the mobile phone leans against the palm of the right hand. Thumb naturally clicks the screen to focus, adjusts the exposure, and presses the virtual shutter button.

When shooting vertically, hold the phone tightly with your left hand, gently lean your right hand on your palm, and press your thumb.

Everyone has a familiar posture; There is no formula.

Lose no time in taking a picture of ...

Familiarity with the gesture of grabbing a shot can help us shoot some unexpected scenes. Usually, the mobile phone is placed on the table in the underwear pocket, and the screen is locked. It is the key to enter the camera interface in the shortest time and keep your hands in the shooting posture. There are two main points: when picking up the phone, the thumb slides from the edge of the screen and quickly enters the camera interface; Quickly put on a pose of "posing". Usually this process will not take more than 2 seconds.

Grab the shot-1, take out your mobile phone and light up the screen.

Snap -2. Slide your thumb to the left to enter the photo interface.

Grab the shot -3, quickly adjust the posture and enter the photo state.

Continuous snapshot action

(of photographers) snapping photos in the street.

When an important event occurs at the climax of a trip, it is often used. There are several experiences to share: holding the mobile phone in your hand during street sweeping will give people a "curiosity-seeking" mentality; It is not recommended to open the photography interface at any time (it consumes a lot of power), but the thumb is ready to quickly enter the photography function by swiping the left screen lock interface at any time; It can be used as a shutter trigger in conjunction with the earphone volume key. Here we will talk about one-handed operation alone. Take the iPhone as an example, you need to use your right thumb to "lock the screen and slide to the left to turn on the photography function", and then press the volume button with your index finger as the shutter. If time permits, after the photography function is turned on, you can click on the screen with your right thumb to determine the focus, and even slide up and down to adjust the exposure.

One-handed operation trilogy. Although the above operation is not difficult, it still takes some practice to form a few familiar gestures.

One-handed continuous action

Stand up straight, stand up straight, steady.

The beginning of photography operation is not to find those inexplicable and crooked "innovations", but to put the mobile phone straight and take pictures honestly, easily, brightly and firmly. Because we observe the world, our heads are slightly tilted, and we don't feel that the world is tilted. For photos, a little tilt of the horizon will be sensitively perceived. Let's take a look at the winning works of 2065 438+06 IPPA. At least half follow this principle. I just learned piano when I was a child and I like Chopin's music very much. I was fascinated by the master's performance that sounded a little "free and easy" (later I learned that it was called Rubato's free expansion and contraction), so I imitated it and was stopped by the teacher. He thought that the foundation was not good at that time and it was not flexible enough. He insisted that I practice in a uniform, steady and rhythmic way. Sure enough, when I reached a certain level and learned some music, I naturally felt "relaxed". And most importantly, I found that even in the free expansion and contraction of the game, it is built on a solid and stable skeleton, not arbitrary. My understanding of this point is consistent with my view on photographic composition. We need to understand and stabilize a scene, and then push and pull.

This means that in most cases: make the horizontal line horizontal and the vertical line vertical, at least in the case that the vertical line cannot be vertical, ensure the horizontal line is horizontal. This also means that even if you look up and down, you should straighten your phone flat-unless you have enough reasons to get a diagonal composition. Needless to say, although high-end smartphones such as iPhone have better anti-shake optimization, too strong jitter will still blur the picture.

Through the analysis of the above winning works, we can easily find the horizontal and vertical structural lines. The straight shot method is suitable for most situations.

Putting it right is not the golden rule. You can say that there are many distorted, natural, relaxed, powerful and contradictory photos in Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama. The "straightening" mentioned here is to avoid those embarrassing skewness, know the shooting scene fairly well, and take the photos slowly and steadily.

The works of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. The "skew" in his works has a reason rather than blindness.

Clean the lens

The mobile phone has no lens cover, and the high usage rate will also cause the lens to be dirty easily, and fingerprints are most likely to accumulate on it. If the lens or mirror of a SLR camera is dirty, it is easy to form black stains on the screen, which can be removed with a stain removal tool. But the lens of the mobile phone, especially the fingerprint on it, will make the picture appear lens halo. If there are lights in the photo scene, this glare will be infinitely magnified, even across the whole composition, and the damage to the photo is devastating.

So we often check whether the lens of the mobile phone is dirty. This simple habit can even be said that if you take more important photos, you will definitely wipe the lens of your mobile phone with a napkin.

Take pictures with the focal length that mobile phones are good at.

At the previous mobile phone photography sharing meeting, this was called "zoom with caution". Considering that many brands of mobile phones have introduced dual lenses or even zoom lenses, I no longer think zoom is a terrible thing. First of all, let beginners know what are the different shooting angles of each focal segment. The smaller the focal length, the larger the viewing angle of the lens, and to a certain extent, it can occupy a wider space when it is close to the object being photographed. We call it a wide-angle lens. Such as the common 14mm super wide-angle lens, 16mm wide-angle lens and 24mm wide-angle lens.

The larger the focal length, the smaller the lens angle of view, and to a certain extent, the smaller the angle of view, which can draw distant objects very close. We call it telephoto lens, such as the common 135mm, 200mm or even 400mm lens. Many enthusiasts are keen on shooting birds, and wildlife photography needs a telephoto lens. The focal lengths of the above two ends are quite different from those of human eyes.

The focal length between them, such as 35mm and 50mm, is commonly called "standard lens", and the viewing angle is relatively normal, close to the human eye. Most mobile phone lenses are in this focal zone. Therefore, the scene we observe through the lens of the mobile phone is close to the human eye or slightly larger than the human eye's perspective. This also means that the photography scenes that mobile phones are good at are also from this perspective. Mobile phones are not suitable for shooting wild animals and birds in the distance, or shooting the big moon, nor for shooting the details of athletes in the stands, let alone shooting wide scenes at close range. Mobile phone photography is suitable for what our eyes see (or slightly wider than human eyes), with a focal length of about 28mm or 35 mm. Of course, now more and more mobile phones have dual lenses (such as 56 mm for iPhone 7p), and it is not difficult to shoot a telephoto angle of more than 56 mm.

At present, the mobile phone lens is not qualified to record scenes with exaggerated perspectives such as wide angle and telephoto, and can only "imitate" its effect through external lenses.

Let's talk about zoom again. The essence of mobile phone photography can be divided into several situations:

Single-lens mobile phone-a fixed-focus camera with a focal length of about 28 mm, when we slide the screen with two fingers open, the scene gets closer. This is not to say that the focal length of the mobile phone lens has become longer, but that a part of the recorded scene has been "cut" through electronic zoom. For example, the image of the ab section in the above picture is cropped by 28mm, which simulates the feeling of the telephoto AB section image, but the image quality is greatly affected. Dual-lens mobile phones ―― 28mm and 56mm dual fixed-focus cameras. When we turn on the shooting function of iPhone7p, the default is the same 28mm lens as before, which is1x; At this time; When we clicked 2x, we had switched to the 56mm lens. If you continue to zoom in, the mobile phone will perform digital zoom based on the 56mm lens, with a maximum of10x; . /kloc-between 0/x and 2x? In fact, it is a digital zoom on 28mm, but because the stretching is not very serious, the loss of image quality will not be too serious. From 1x to 2x, the iPhone is still very smooth and almost flawless.

Although 10 times zoom can be achieved for the zoom chart of iPhone7P, we still recommend using 1x and 2x for fixed focus, and the zoom should not exceed 3x.

The principle of taking photos by mobile phone is to use only the original focal length of the lens as far as possible, and only use a slight electronic zoom. Otherwise, the quality of the output photos will be greatly affected. Take the iPhone as an example. Usually I will control the zoom to within 3 times. It can be seen that the range of focal length that a mobile phone can guarantee a certain image quality is still limited, and it is still a small range dominated by standard lenses (although this range is constantly expanding). But we don't think this is a depressing thing. In the past, many street shots only took a few focal lengths (for example, Bresson's 50mm and 35mm), which was close to that of mobile phones. At least we don't have to worry about the focal length. Take a good focus of it with your mobile phone.

The following sentence is well summed up: "Photography with a mobile phone is actually a small wide angle of 28mm".

Use the flash carefully.

At present, the flash is the weakness of the photography function of various brands of mobile phones. In most cases, the photos of the built-in flash of mobile phones are mostly blunt, which only plays the role of "filling light", far from "lighting". In professional photography technology, the use of flash, spotlight and natural light complement each other, which is very skillful and not suitable for the positioning of mobile phone photography. So, in most cases, I will turn off the automatic flash button for taking pictures on my mobile phone. Enjoy the world created by natural light and scene light.

Less is more.

We are all talking about operation. If one of composition and material selection must be regarded as the initial principle, I think it is this one.

Less is more, and "less is more" means using as few elements as possible to express the meaning of concentration. When I first came into contact with photography, the "beauty" observed by my eyes always tended to be "all" recorded, and then I gradually realized that greed could not take good photos. Focusing on the overall situation from a small point of view and giving up boldly can often have unexpected effects. Looking through IPPA's award-winning works over the years, we can also find that the composition with single center and concentrated theme accounts for a large part.