I’ve been dramatically underusing my cell phone camera! It’s been great learning to use a DSLR, which made it fun to apply those principles to phone photography!
lens compression
I knew lens compression affected the background of the image, but I didn’t expect all the other subtle differences in how these two photos turned out. The first was zoomed out all the way and taken about 8 inches away, and the second was zoomed x3 from about 4 feet away. I used a grid to frame it so the center flower would be the same size. Just about everything else turned out completely different! The flowers surrounding it look larger, closer, and fuller. I think it’s especially interesting that the shadows in the latter picture are both brighter and sharper. I used identical settings to edit the brightness and contrast of both photos using Snapseed.
point of view
A foosball table can be pretty … boring. But by getting up close there’s a lot of interesting detail to capture. I took this photo by pressing my camera against the hole in the side, then zoomed to capture the details on the face (more lens compression!)
shallow depth
My phone normally takes shallow photos with really good bokeh, but by using portrait mode it zoomed in slightly (again, lens compression!) and increased the background blur. And even though the angle of the camera didn’t change, the shape of the subject changed because of the compression. It turned out better than I expected!
flat lay
My desk was initially crowded with all the art supplies I could round up, but it looked way too busy so I pared it down to just a few essentials. I stood on a chair to get a straight-down photo of the scene. I warmed up the hue in post and added text to the image.
I’m excited to continue exploring what I can do with phone photography – and my real camera.