From the course: Photography Foundations: Mobile Photography

Who this course is for

From the course: Photography Foundations: Mobile Photography

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Who this course is for

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- We're calling the subject of this course mobile photography because here in the year 2020 for some reason we all still distinguish between photography and mobile photography. That is photography performed with a real camera and photography performed with a smartphone camera. But why this distinction? These days when it comes to image quality it can be hard to tell the difference in the photo shot with a real camera and the photo shot with a smartphone camera because smartphone cameras have gotten so good. The assumption in this course is that you want to improve your skills as a photographer and you're going to use your smartphone as your camera. Now throughout the history of photography there have been camera technologies that have required specific techniques and instruction. Large format view cameras, modular medium format cameras, SLRs. The smartphone camera is just another camera technology that requires some specific study. With a real camera you have a very fine level of control over exposure parameters. You might have the option to attach different lenses. You have several different kinds of light meters and so on. All of those features combine to give you a tremendous amount of creative flexibility. How do you get that same flexibility from a smartphone camera with limited controls and a fixed lens? That's some of the stuff we'll be covering here. With the rise of the smartphone camera came the rise of social media photography which is a genre of photography all to itself. Like any other photographic genre social media photography has trends and styles and fashions. And like any photography assignment when you're shooting for social media you shoot with a particular goal. This is not a course in social media photography. I am not going to discuss the current trends and styles and fashions. I'm not going to explain what types of images yield the most likes and so on. In fact some of the advice I'm going to give you will yield images that aren't well-suited to posting on social media. Our goal in this course is to learn to produce excellent photographs. Of course you can post those images to social media sites but that's different than shooting with the goal of a social media photo. If you're a beginning photographer this course is going to give you some of the basics that all photographers need to know regardless of what kind of camera you're using. If you're more experienced then this course should help you understand how to translate what you already know to the use of your smartphone camera. Hopefully by the end of this course you're going to see a big improvement in the quality of your photos.

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