From the course: Photography Foundations: Mobile Photography

What you need to know

From the course: Photography Foundations: Mobile Photography

Start my 1-month free trial

What you need to know

- Obviously you need a phone camera for this course. Now I'm not going to talk about specific phones running particular camera apps, so any type of phone and any camera app should be fine. There might be times when I'll ask you to look for a particular feature in your camera app like an exposure compensation feature or the flash feature. So if you're not already familiar with your camera application's interface, then it would be a good idea to find some kind of reference material to have handy. I'll be working with this iPhone 11 Pro which is pretty much the state-of-the-art at this time of shooting, this means that it is possible that I will cover a feature that you don't have such as the wide-angle lens on this phone. I encourage you to not skip those sections of this course, partly because a familiarity with newer features will help you make buying decisions when you one day upgrade your phone, but also because exposure to any photographic technique or practice can help change the way that you see and alter the way that you think about the construction of an image. You cannot know too much about photographic process. You can, however, not know enough, which is why we're going to start this course with some basic exposure theory. This is the stuff that you would learn in any photographic course built around any other kind of camera and there's no reason to not know this stuff just because you're working with a smart phone camera. If you're already an experienced photographer then you might be able to skip some of the movies in the Basics chapter, but I encourage you to watch "How is Exposure Different on a Smart Phone?" because some aspects of exposure are different on a smart phone from what they are on a normal camera. Finally, you need time. No one watches a course or reads a book and becomes a great photographer. They only thing that will make you a great photographer is practice, practice at looking at images, practice at shooting images, practice at editing images. So if you're serious about photography, decide right now to set aside dedicated time to practice shooting. I recommend it as something that you do by yourself, and each time you head out the door remind yourself that it is perfectly normal to not like the majority of the photos that you come back with. As we'll see, that's simply how the process of making good photos works.

Contents