Bluebell walk – take better photos with your mobile phone

Are you planning on going on a bluebell walk this weekend? Now is the perfect time for bluebells in Sussex, so I highly recommend it.

Even though I’m a professional photographer and use big heavy cameras for work, I love mobile phone photography! It’s the camera I have with me every day and I take a lot of photos with it on my daily dog walks.

Here are a few tips on how to take better photos with a mobile phone when you head out to the woods to see the beautiful flowers.

Tip no. 1

Get close. Rather than taking a general photo of a scene, get as close as you can with your mobile phone camera, for a more interesting photo with impact.

This can me a little tricky with a tiny camera, though… sometimes when you try to get a photo of something very close to the camera, you end up with a photo like this.

Clearly this is no good… the object in the foreground that you were meaning to take a photo of, is completely out of focus, while the unimportant background is in focus. It’s not easy to get the lens to focus on the closest subject when it’s relatively small in the frame. How to get around this problem? Use your other hand to focus on. Place your hand in front of the object and let the camera focus on that.

Then take away your other hand, and take the shot!

Sometimes, when you come home from your bluebell walk you may be surprised that the photos don’t look as good as you remember it looked out there in the woods. Somehow, you remember it being a lot more blue than it looks in the photos you took! (This has happened to me, too.)

If so, try taking photos from lower down… that way, you get a nice concentration of blueness, rather than lots of little blue spots scattered around.

Always good to have a cute dog in a photo…

…or a cute child, if you happen to have one of those. For both, try the lower angle tip again: crouch down and take a photo from their eye level, rather than looking down on them.