Simple Photography Tips for You - Getting better exposure on photos with your phone camera

Five tips on getting Better exposure on photos with your phone camera

• Be aware of the variation of light and dark

• Use the metering system on your camera to select the right exposure

• Think about balance of light and dark zones

• Are there critical colour zones?

• Experiment!

Let's have a look at getting better exposure on photos with your phone camera. The other evening I was out walking the dog. The weather was typically autumnal, we'd had rain during the day, but as the evening drew towards dark, the sky cleared from the West.

Landscape image with good exposure balance using on-phone metering

The sun set as I entered through the gate at the base of the downs, and when by the time I ascended above the trees, the clouds had turned to flush pink. It was never a prizewinning scene, but one to send to daughter overseas, as a reminder of home.

Now I'm forever going on about the importance of having interest in the whole image, and in this case there was nothing stunning by way of silhouette, but the foreground had the track and slope, with just enough light to give foreground interest, maybe.

Landscape image just after sunset. Metering on the sky

Getting the exposure right on your phone camera, varies a bit according to your camera supplier, and this is based upon the Iphone14 Pro.

The difficulty was the exposure - a point and shoot was good for the sky, but the foreground interest was too dark in this first attempt.

It's at this point that the little yellow 'focus/exposure' box comes into it's own. Let's look at what I mean.

So the first image is what I managed to produce in the end, just to show what to work towards. the second image above shows the exposure being taken from the pink of the sky, where there is quite a lot of light, which fools the camera into making the foreground too dark. That's the default setting and what I'd have got if I didn't bother to go for that bit better.

I thought that metering on the boundary between the sky and the dark would give me a much better reading than it did.

With the next image, I set the reading to come from the foreground, as you can see everything has become light, to my mind even the foreground is too light; and the pink of the sky is almost lost in places.

Landscape image just after sunset. Metering on the grass/woodland boundary.

The final image is just about right. In this lighting situation something has to give, and as lovely as a deep pink sky is, the sacrifice to get an overall balance is worth it.

Landscape image just after sunset. Pink sky. Good exposure