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cozyandspirit

How to make spectacular travel photos with your phone?

Updated: Jan 21, 2022

If our telephone is full of boring photos, with some simple tricks and rules we can say goodbay to the trivial photos. We don’t need an expensive camera, just a smart phone. If we try these tips, we’ll suprise that our photos will be full of life and art.

Let’s start with the different time of day photo shooting. If we try to take a photo in the noonday, the shadows will be short and marked, and the countours will be sharp, this is the hard light. Overall there is not too easy to find a theme, that can be photograped well at noon, so we should try to make our photos in the following daytime:


1. Blue Hour: Before sunrise and after sunset


The short period before sunrise is called blue hour, when the sun has not yet appeared on the horizon, but it is close to it. This is about 30 minutes before the appearance of the sun. In that time the sky shows a wonderful deep blue color and the photos visualise an unearthly experience which is so unique.

Silvaplana tó, Svájc
Lake Silvaplana , Switzerland

The same blue hour returns at sunset, about 15 minutes after the sun leaves the horizon, when the sunlights do not directly illuminate the earth but part of the atmosphere. In these photos the subject shines out of the background without any disturbing shadow or other lights.


2. Golden Hour: After sunrise and before sunset


The short period after sunrise, when the sun appears on the horizon line or when it leaves the horizon (at sunset) but has not yet disappeared, is called the golden hour. This is when the subject of our photos gets a gentle light that softens the contours, so this light is especially suitable for portrait photography.

Horseshoe Bend, Arizona, US
Horseshoe Bend, Arizona, US

A pleasantly warm, golden shade appears in the photos, which creates a particularly eye-catching harmony with the gentle light, this shade can change the all theme like a postcard.

Dalton, US
Dalton, US

3. Rule of thirds


If you want to add dynamics to the images, the best solution is to set the main subject of your photo (what you want to focus on) according to the rule of thirds. Themes set in the middle, symmetrically, seem a bit monotonous, boring, so much better visual results can be achieved with thirding. The subject you want to photograph should be at intersection of the third lines, not in the center of the composition. The two horizontal and vertical image lines set in the camera of our phone, so we can place the main subject in 4 intersections:

wikimedia common

We have to put the subject of the theme to one of these thirds:

Hug Fesztivál, Csesznek
Hug Festival, Csesznek

4. Frog perspective


With this change of perspective, we can add playfulness and uniqueness to our images. From this perspective we take the photo from bottom to up, if it is necessary we have to lie down to the ground for the sake of a good angle. If we photograph someone - or even dogs or cats - in this way, holding the camera up, the subject of the image will look much larger than it really is. However, this change of perspective can be very exciting when we take photo about buildings and interiors.

Hanna Miram Larsen flickr.com Kathrin & Stefan Marks flickrcom



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