Just about everyone has a smartphone in their pocket these days, and while snapping a few photos of friends and family works perfectly on your iPhone, you might be hesitant to use it to take photos for your business’s website.
If this was 2009, we’d totally agree with you, but these days, Apple has made their iPhone cameras so unbelievably powerful that you can take amazing, high-quality photos that will be perfect for your business—you just need a few accessories to make those pictures really shine.
Here are some best practices for taking stellar photos that will make your brand look incredible and professional.
1. It’s All About the Lighting
Photos might be worth a thousand words, but they’re worthless if your lighting is bad. There’s only so much Photoshop magic you can do for a picture that has poor lighting—and if you’re a newbie to photography, the last thing you want to do is try to figure out the beast that is Photoshop.
Instead, invest in some great lighting products, like a lightbox for taking product photos or a ring and box lights for portrait photos.
This will let the details of your photos stand out well and keep you from spending hours editing each photo. And besides, many website platforms have automated built-in photo-editing features that can do what you want anyway.
2. Backgrounds and Backdrops Help Create the Right Aesthetic
Amazon is your best friend when it comes to backgrounds or backdrops. Sure, you can figure out ways of adding these with photo editing magic, but do you really want to?
A few low-cost backdrops will let you match just about any style, and you can even buy green screens if you want to try to get really creative.
3. Tripods Will Change Your Life
The biggest problem most newbies run into with pictures on an iPhone is inconsistent or blurred pictures. A simple tripod setup will ensure pictures look sharp and clear.
To make your life even easier, many tripods on Amazon come with a Bluetooth remote shutter for hands-free snapping. That way, you can put yourself in the pictures if you need to, but you can also back away from the camera and ensure the angle is just right while taking a picture.
4. Learn Your Settings
While most cameras do have a learning curve, it’s pretty low for the iPhone. Still, you’ll want to spend a little time understanding your settings. This will save you a lot of time in the long run—it’s so much easier to just take the perfect picture instead of trying to make photo editing software obey you.
Try experimenting with composition, shadows, exposure, warmth, and of course, all the filters you have available natively. You can often get the exact look you want without ever having to use editing software.
5. Avoid Zooming in
This might not be obvious, but using the zoom-in function on your iPhone can actually make your photos look blurry—or even downright ugly.
While zoom is great if you’re just trying to capture something you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, it’s terrible for website photos. Remember, the screen on your iPhone is a lot smaller than a computer screen, which is where about half of your customers will be looking at your website.
If a photo is slightly blurry on your iPhone, it’s going to look awful blown up on a computer screen.
6. Check Out Burst Mode
The iPhone has a ton of awesome features that make professional cameras unnecessary for everyone but true pros, and one of those is burst mode.
This feature lets you take 10 photos in a row, which is great for action shots. If you’re not sure exactly when to take a single photo to get the shot you want, try burst mode and pick the best of the bunch.
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