Take your family photos to the next level

I promised this course wouldn’t be overly technical or theoretical, and it isn’t – but in this section we will get just a teeeny bit techy, because I need you to understand the fundamental difference between results that you can achieve with a phone vs with a camera. You’ll be able to apply all the lessons in the course just the same, but you will still get different results on different devices.

Mobile phones try to win over their competitions in the camera area by touting ever increasing megapixel counts… but let me tell you something that’ll surprise you. I have a Sony Xperia mobile phone, which was released in 2018, and has 19 megapixels. I also have a small backup camera that was released in 2015, and it only has 16 megapixels. In theory – and many people do still think this way – my phone should be able to take “better” pictures than my camera, right? 

WRONG.

Without getting technical, because I promised I wouldn’t, I’ll just tell you that megapixels aren’t everything, not even close. I would still choose my 16 megapixel camera over any mobile phone out there at this point in time. They are just not comparable in the creative options they give you.

I published a whole book of portraits, all taken on that little 16 megapixel camera. I would not dare dream to even start aiming for similar results using my phone, or any phone.

So, if megapixel count isn’t as important, what is?

Well, again, without getting too technical, the number one reason I don’t like to use phones for my family photography, or any photos with people in them really, is the distortion, closely followed by the lack of background blur and depth. 

The lenses used in mobile phones are usually very wide angle. This means the closer you get to your subject, the more it visibly distorts their appearance, this is just some physics I won’t go into. This could be used in a flattering way, to make eyes look bigger and bodies to look slimmer in selfies (notice how influences often take selfies from slightly above eye level, looking up?) but it can VERY easily go wrong and be unflattering when you’re trying to photograph someone from close up. 

But why don’t we just stand further away then, to avoid the distortion, and zoom in, you ask?  

Well, because we don’t want to use the zoom on the phone. Ever ever. It’s not a real zoom, it’s basically a digital enlargement of the existing picture your camera is “seeing”, so you’re sacrificing quality. You *could* crop the photo afterwards to have more of your subject in the frame, but due to the quality of phone lenses not being terribly great, as I mentioned above, they won’t capture smaller details as well as a proper camera. So if you crop then those imperfect details will be larger and more visible.  On a digital camera, with a quality lens that can zoom, you are able to avoid the distortion issue AND retain the quality of your image. You can also change your lenses around, with different types of lenses offering different types of distortion. You can read more about the technical explanation if you google “lens focal length distortion examples”. 

In this course I’m teaching you stuff that’ll improve ANY photo you take if you use the knowledge, regardless of what device you use, as long as you’re aware of the limitations of your particular phone. IPhones seem to have somewhat better cameras these days, so you might fare better if you own one of those. If you are able to use a dedicated camera for certain outings and special occasions if nothing else, where you know you’ll probably want some album worthy photos, I’d definitely recommend giving it a go at least, even if just on Auto mode.

While we’re on the subject of cameras, and a bit of tech talk (and I promise this is the last bit of that), I’ll give you one more tip: it’s not even about the camera, as such. It’s about the lens. The optics and build quality of lenses is a big subject, but I would say a good lens and an average camera will get you better photos than an average lens and a good camera. Especially for portraits and that pleasing background blur that most people love.

And the major limitation of phones is that their lenses, due to their small size, just don’t have that same quality and probably won’t for a while yet. The “portrait mode” tries to detect the person in your photos and create an artificial background blur to achieve this effect, and in some cases it looks quite good, but it’s not consistent and it can’t be used for moving subjects… like children running around, for example.

Optional assignment:

If you have both a camera and a phone, and a willing family member who will stay still for a couple of seconds… Ask them to just be still and look into the camera for you, straight on, and try to take a nice portrait of them first with one device. Then, without your subject moving, take the same shot with your phone. Then compare the two – what differences do you see? Do you prefer one, or the other? Why?  Do this exercise on various scenes in your daily life to train your eye to anticipate the differences between what your eye sees, what your camera sees, and what your phone sees. (Tip: don’t worry if it doesn’t click at first. It took me years of practice to envision a shot and execute it exactly how I’d imagined it in my head!)