9 Tips for Photographing Instagramable Landscapes with Smartphones

How to take landscape photos with a smartphone to produce cool photos

mrfdn – If you want to learn to make landscape photos but don’t have a DSLR or mirrorless camera, don’t worry. Because actually you can make good landscape photos from your cellphone / smartphone.

Try to remember, have you ever taken a trip to a tourist spot or happened to see a cool sight, instantly you took the cellphone that was in your pocket. Then snap here and there.

But sometimes the results are not what you want.

Now in this article I want to give tips and powerful ways so that you can produce cool and instagramable landscape photos from your smartphone.

how to take landscape photos with cellphone

1. Before shooting landscapes using a cellphone, make sure your cellphone camera lens is clean

The cellphone camera must be clean to make cool landscape photos

When you take your phone out of your pocket. Pay attention to the cleanliness of the lens. Don’t let your cellphone camera get dirty, because this will cause your landscape photos to not be optimal.

The effect that is usually caused if the cellphone camera lens is dirty is the dew effect, which makes the image look blurry and cannot focus on the object of the photo.

2. High resolution settings on your cellphone camera

setting a high cellphone camera resolution

This is important, don’t change the resolution of your cellphone camera. Use the highest resolution. If your cellphone’s camera resolution is 16 megapixels, then use that resolution. Do not downgrade to 8 megapixels or 4 megapixels.

When the camera resolution is lowered, your landscape photos will be smaller. It will be difficult to edit or print later.

Even if you post to social media then the results will be broken.

3. A cool landscape photo starts with determining a cool composition and angle

looking for landscape photo compositions with a cellphone camera

The next important thing is to use your knowledge of photographic composition.

In general, people usually use the rule of third composition, leading line, or framing. Take advantage of it if you get an interesting object.

In addition, explore the objects and locations you visit by taking photos from different angles.

When photos are taken from different angles, your photos will be more unique, and even better than other landscape photos you’ve ever seen.

4. If you feel the results are not good, try again

photographing landscape on the shore of a foggy lake

Don’t settle for just one photo. Try taking photos in different places.

Look for the right moment such as sunset or sunrise at that location.

5. Use a tripod or place the cellphone on a good pedestal so that the photos don’t shake/shake

small tripod for cellphone or small camera

If you have a tripod, this is a good investment. You can create photos with interesting photographic effects.

Examples of photographic effects in question are such as making long exposure photos.

6. If necessary, use an additional lens to get a wide . effect

If your cellphone doesn’t have a wide angle mode, you can buy an additional lens. This lens is mounted on the back of the cellphone.

The effect will make your landscape photo wider than usual.

7. Do not use the digital zoom feature of the cellphone because the results will break

If the object you take is far enough, try getting closer to the object.

But if you can’t get any closer, then take advantage of the objects around you to make the foreground. So the results are more interesting.

If you do digital zoom on your cellphone camera, the photos will not be optimal.

You will get a very bad photo artifact effect. Which when the photo is enlarged then the photo will be broken.

8. Remember that a good landscape photo is a photo that tells a story

You can choose to display a single photo or photo series.

If you display only one landscape photo, then the photo must be strong. Add a story to the photo.

Another term is story telling in photography.

Whereas photo series are several single photos put together with other landscape photos. When a photo series is shown to other people, or posted to social media such as Instagram, the photo will tell more of a story.

What places did you visit, what was interesting in that place, and so on.