How to photograph landscapes with your smartphone

This is a rather large topic, but I’ll try to keep it short and sweet.

if you are interested in taking landscapes, I recommend grabbing a little tripod, this will immediately increase the quality of your landscape photos. Manfrotto Pixi Mini Tripod is an option (this is what I use) and this works wonders even in dimly lit environments.

Have you ever taken a photo in poorly lit area and noticed a lot of photo noise/artifacting? This happens when there is not enough light and your phone tries to compensate by making it’s sensor more sensitive to the available light in the area (this is called ISO).

To combat this, you need to make the shutter speed lower. The higher the shutter speed, the faster the phone takes the photo (this works well when you want to freeze a movement like a wave splash), however the lower the shutter, the longer it stays open, and any movement is much more noticeable (this makes water from the ocean smooth out). Lower shutter speed allows more light to enter the camera as it’s opening and closing slowly, and this will bring you all the details back to your photo while keeping your ISO low to avoid noise.

I hope that wasn’t too long, but the main point is, grab a small phone tripod to keep the phone steady so everything stays in focus and prevent blur while the phone shutter is opening and closing to allow the light to hit the sensor and nab yourself some quality landscape photos in less lit situations.