The 6 photography tricks I use to take better photos

Smartphone cameras have evolved at a breakneck pace over the last decade. From multiple camera arrays to massive 1-inch sensors and ever-improving computational pipelines, the hardware is all there to enable top-tier photography. Yet, despite the best camera smartphones housing hardware that rivals dedicated high-end cameras from a few years ago, far too many of the photos we capture still scream mobile snapshot rather than professional photography. Ask photographers, and they will tell you — the difference between an amateur snapshot and a professional-looking image rarely comes down to megapixels or lenses. Instead, it hinges entirely on what you can do with the camera system.

Over years of testing flagship Android devices and evaluating mobile imaging systems, I have come across the simple fact that, ironically, breaking free from standard smartphone habits is all it takes to yield the biggest leap in image quality. Manufacturers tune their camera apps to deliver a bright, wide, and safe image that looks pleasing on social media in a single tap. However, if you want your images to stand out, you might want to push past these defaults. By making a few deliberate changes to your shooting workflow, you can elevate your mobile photography from a casual hobby to something genuinely artistic. Here are a few simple changes you can make.

Conventional wisdom says that you should avoid digital zoom. However, hear me out. The default primary camera lens on almost every modern smartphone is a wide-angle lens, usually offering a 23 mm to 24 mm equivalent focal length. This wide field of view is excellent for capturing expansive landscapes or tight indoor spaces, but it is fundamentally a poor choice for portraits or close-up subjects. Wide-angle lenses inherently suffer from perspective distortion, which stretches objects near the edges of the frame and unnaturally elongates facial features. If you take a portrait at close range using the standard 1x lens, you will likely notice that the subject’s nose looks larger and the ears seem to recede into the background. Not just portraits — all photography benefits from isolating the subject from the clutter around it.

To counter this distortion in portraits, isolate your subject, and give your photos a more professional look, you might want to consider taking a couple of steps backward and switching to a 1.5x or 2x zoom level. Many modern flagships feature high-resolution primary sensors that offer a lossless in-sensor crop at these intermediate focal lengths, effectively giving you a 35 mm to 50 mm equivalent view without sacrificing detail.

This tighter focal length flattens the perspective, bringing elements closer together and rendering facial features with much more natural, flattering proportions. It also forces you to be more selective about what stays within your frame, removing distracting background clutter and resulting in a cleaner, more deliberate composition that mirrors the look of a dedicated prime lens on a DSLR.

Look, I’m beyond the point of complaining about aggressive post-processing in photos. Smartphone manufacturers are clearly locked in an arms race to deliver images that look instantly shareable, which often results in heavy-handed software processing. Right out of the box, many device camera apps activate hidden filters, beauty modes, skin-smoothing algorithms, and aggressive noise-reduction layers.

While these tools aim to create flawless skin tones or eliminate digital grain, they frequently end up stripping away the fine textures and micro-contrasts that give an image character. A face devoid of texture quickly ends up looking like a plastic doll, and a landscape subjected to overzealous noise reduction can take on a muddy, painterly appearance upon closer inspection. This is especially the case with phones from brands like Oppo.

If you want your mobile photography to stand out, you need to dive into your camera settings and disable as many of these enhancements as possible. Look for beauty sliders, scene optimizers, and smoothing toggles, then turn them completely off. You want your photograph to surface natural texture, fabric weaves, and even skin pores. Preserving these micro-details adds a layer of authenticity to your images that computational smoothing simply cannot replicate. If your phone supports a Pro mode or offers a high-quality RAW format, consider switching to it for stand-out shots that bypass the heavy default sharpening filters altogether, leaving you with a clean file that you can subtly tweak later while still having the option to reverse those edits.

High dynamic range photography is a mainstay of modern computational photography. But that’s not how real cameras work. The camera app on most phones evaluates every scene and attempts to lift shadows and tame highlights so that nothing is hidden. While this aggressive high-dynamic-range processing is a marvel for convenience, it often flattens the natural contrast of a scene, robbing it of mood and drama. Furthermore, in an effort to brighten the shadows, the auto-exposure system will frequently overexpose the highlights, blowing out sky details, neon signs, or light reflections into flat white sections that cannot be recovered. Having natural contrast where not everything is necessarily visible is a key aspect of elevating your image from a smartphone photo to something that looks professional.

It turns out, you can easily take control of this. There’s, of course, the toggle to switch off HDR in the camera app. But if you want the best of both worlds, there’s an even easier option. Just utilize the exposure lock feature on your smartphone. Tap on your primary subject to set the focus point and then manually slide the exposure icon downward to darken the scene.

By intentionally underexposing your smartphone images, you protect the details in the brightest areas of the frame while allowing shadows to fall into deep, rich blacks. This single adjustment introduces a sense of cinematic depth and moodiness that you won’t get with the standard mobile photography experience, turning a relatively flat, brightly lit snapshot into something with a story behind it. I turn down the exposure to -1 on my camera and do the same on my phone. Simple as that.

Bokeh-maxxing is an epidemic that plagues pretty much every mediocre smartphone photograph you come across. I get it. When smartphone manufacturers first introduced digital portrait modes, they felt like magic. The ability to simulate the shallow depth of field of an expensive f/1.4 lens using software is, on paper, pretty cool. It’s the go-to strategy when you want to make your photograph look a bit more elevated. But let’s be real. Nine out of 10 times, you’re not fooling anyone. In fact, I’d say relying too heavily on portrait mode is one of the easiest ways to make your photos look cheap.

Computational bokeh pipelines, as good as they’ve become, still struggle with edge detection, frequently blurring out fine hair strands, eyeglass frames, clothing edges, or things like a glass of wine, creating an unnatural halo effect that instantly exposes the image as an artificial smartphone photograph.

Professional image separation is not just about turning the background into a blurry mush; it is about how smoothly the focus falls off from the foreground to the background. Some of the most iconic lenses have a distinctive pattern to the bokeh fall-off.

Instead of forcing a digital filter to fake this effect, you should look for opportunities to create genuine physical depth of field. And given today’s smartphone hardware, that’s very much possible. In fact, it’s fairly simple. You can achieve natural background blur just by maximizing the distance between your subject and the background while minimizing the distance between your phone and your subject.

Many modern smartphones now sport large enough sensors and telephoto modules that naturally produce beautiful, organic bokeh without any software intervention. Try using that instead. It might not be as dramatic as software blur, but neither is actual bokeh unless you’re using an ultra-fast prime lens. That’s not to say that there’s no place for portrait mode. However, I’d reserve the dedicated portrait mode solely for situations where the background is incredibly chaotic, and your physical positioning cannot fix it; even then, consider dialing down the simulated aperture strength to keep the effect subtle and believable.

This is perhaps the simplest but most overlooked photography trick. The giant lightbulb in the sky can elevate or completely ruin your photograph. For example, taking photos in the middle of a clear day under the direct, midday sun is a recipe for underwhelming images. Harsh, overhead lighting creates deep, unflattering shadows beneath a subject’s eyes and nose, while simultaneously washing out colors and creating extreme contrast that tests the limits of any sensor. No amount of computational optimization can fix the flat, sterile quality of bad light.

To elevate your imagery, you must learn to time your photography around the quality of the sun. There’s a reason why the period just after sunrise and right before sunset is universally known as the golden hour. The long, directional shadows and warm, diffused glow offer extremely flattering light that can make any subject look great.

If you must shoot during the middle of the day, look for open shade under trees, awnings, or building overhangs. The environment acts as a massive, natural softbox, shielding the subject from harsh glare and providing even, soft illumination that looks incredibly polished and professional. Moreover, it goes without saying that you should never shoot with the camera facing toward the sun. Your phone’s software has to work extra hard to lift the shadows from faces and subjects, which can add digital noise and color aberrations to the image.

A common trap in mobile photography is centered framing, where the photographer places the subject directly in the dead center of every frame. While centered composition can work wonderfully for strong, architectural symmetry, using it repeatedly for every casual shot is a recipe for a boring catalog of images. Interesting composition is the basis of interesting photography. A professional photograph may use classic structural frameworks to create motion and balance within a static rectangle. If that sounds like too much to think about, here’s the best part: you don’t need to go to film school.

Start by navigating to your camera app preferences and enabling the 3×3 gridline overlay. On some phones, you might have to switch over to Pro mode to enable the overlay. This simple tool allows you to utilize the rule of thirds, a compositional guideline suggesting that you place the most important elements of your image along the gridlines or at their intersection points.

Positioning a subject off-center immediately creates a dynamic look between the subject and the environment, giving the image room to breathe. Beyond the grid, use your eyes to gauge the environment for leading lines, such as walkways, fences, or architectural lines, that naturally steer the viewer’s gaze toward your point of interest. You might also want to look for objects like foliage or interesting doorways to border and frame your subject. These small changes can add a lot of depth to any scene.

I shouldn’t have to say it, but, seriously, a dirty lens can be the difference between an amateur and a professional photograph. Your smartphone lives in your hands, pockets, and bags all day long. Along the way, it catches fingerprints, lint, and dust. When you shoot through a dirty lens, sunlight hitting this oil and grease can cause severe lens flares or reduce the contrast in your image. Ever noticed streetlights and car headlights stretching out into long, ugly streaks of light across the screen? That’s a dirty lens.

Before you ever press the shutter button, just make it a habit to wipe down your camera modules. You don’t need to keep a microfiber cloth on hand, either. Just a quick wipe across a shirt sleeve can make all the difference. It’s a completely free upgrade that takes 2 seconds of your time, ensuring that your phone’s cameras can perform at their absolute peak.

At the end of the day, you don’t need a dedicated DSLR or the most expensive flagship phone on the market to take professional-grade photos. The hardware already living in your pocket is capable of incredible imagery. The real secret to great photography, including smartphone photography, has never been top-of-the-line hardware.

It’s simply wrestling creative control away from the overzealous computational algorithms that try to make every single photo look identical. By simply stepping back to use a tighter focal length, lowering your exposure, or wiping off a layer of lint, you can add your own artistic vision to the frame. Will it be great the first time around? Probably not. But practice, coupled with the suggestions above, is guaranteed to elevate your photography game.

The next time you pull out your phone to capture a moment, take an extra two seconds to tweak your settings, adjust your physical positioning, and work with the available light. Once you start shooting with intention rather than relying on a lazy single tap, you will quickly realize that the best camera upgrade you can make is simply changing how you use the device you already own.