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Last week I engaged myself in a discuss with James Ikpe and Kahli Brown commonly referred to as Tall Brown Boi and 6lackchild respectively. Both are some of the most experienced mobile photographers I know and we got into a rather technical conversation about moving mobile photography past being a point-and-shoot craft.
This piece would be a rather short one as it would be a culmination of the resolution of our conversation.
- The Laws of Photography Still Apply: Most often than not, once you open the camera app on your phone, you leave the chip on your phone to decide all settings for you i.e standard computational photography but the rules of the triangle of exposure still apply (even though you get a fixed aperture, there’s still plenty you can do to compensate for that). Treating mobile photography any different from regular photography discourages growth. If more photographers would approach shooting on their phones like they do shooting on DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, the level of growth that industry would experience in the shortest time would be astounding.
- Try using an External Light Source: The default with mobile photography is to use the available ambient light. Yes, we can go off that with traditional digital photography, you have radio frequency transceivers that help the camera communicate with strobes but currently, they are strobes that utilize Bluetooth technology to work with smartphones (these strobes cost upwards of $1,000 so it’s understandable that the everyday mobile photographer won’t invest that much to get a piece of equipment he/she might barely use) but there’s also regular artificial continuous light that you adapt and modify to fit shoot ideas or in doing so, there’s so much that could be found.
- Experiment: I’ve mentioned numerous times that mobile cameras have come a long way or rather mobile sensors have come a long way and the reality is they’ll keep getting better. The best way to ensure that innovation keeps going in the right direction is to experiment; try new things. Things that would regularly be considered impossible with mobile photography. Push for new measures of photographic greatness. Only then can we move past the idea that mobile photography can’t be professional.
Images by Khali Brown, Used with Permission.
