Popular Science

How to Take the Best Photos with Your Smartphone

Published

6 years ago

January 10, 2019

In many ways, your smartphone camera is better than that DSLR your parents insist on bringing on vacation. In fact, that black rectangle in your pocket can shoot photos that are good enough to be on a billboard or magazine cover, but only if you have the skills to go with the tech. Here are some tips to get professional quality photos—or at least some artsy ones for your Instagram—using just the native camera app on your iOS or Android device.

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Producer/Video by: Jason Lederman
Narrator: Sophie Bushwick
Researcher: Stan Horaczek
Music: APM Music
Special Thanks: Billy Cadden, Ben Lederman
Media: Pixabay, Pexels, Prelinger Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Deposit Photos ()

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12 Comments

BaşıBoş Tv

January 10, 2019 at 7:06 pm

first ?

Reply
Ryan Perry

January 10, 2019 at 7:50 pm

Did not know about the exposure drag feature. Thanks PopSci!

Reply
Amy Schellenbaum

January 10, 2019 at 7:54 pm

Honestly I had no idea that you could fiddle with the exposure time on an iPhone??

Also wow you filmed this on the bridge in January. That is COLD.

Reply
Popular Science

January 10, 2019 at 7:55 pm

We love making these videos with quick tips to improve your everyday tech habits. Have a tech question? Leave it below ?

Reply
- Ryan Perry
  
  January 10, 2019 at 8:12 pm
  
  Same video, but for… video. You could even shoot it on a phone!
  
  Reply
- Oscar Cerro Quiles
  
  January 14, 2019 at 6:55 am
  
  I love you! <3
  
  Reply
- Captain Peter R. Miller
  
  March 24, 2019 at 11:09 pm
  
  +Ryan Perry True Ryan, but hopefully in horizontal format !!.
  
  Reply
jlederman2

January 10, 2019 at 7:58 pm

My dad ALWAYS insists on bringing a 6 year old digital camera on vacation. I keep trying to tell him his iPhone has a better camera but he won’t listen!

Reply
TheCelticGoldsmith Bellchamber

January 12, 2019 at 9:59 pm

Thanks! Learned some new things!

Reply
- Popular Science
  
  January 12, 2019 at 11:42 pm
  
  ?
  
  Reply
Oscar Cerro Quiles

January 14, 2019 at 7:00 am

I feel like I knew nothing of my camera’s smartphone. Ironically enough I new how to do much of that on my old cellphone.

How about an estabilizer instead of a tripod?

Reply
A3Kr0n

February 9, 2019 at 4:53 pm

Clean your lens!

Reply

Popular Science

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With professional-grade setups costing up to six figures at the time, the Videonics brought simple editing to the masses at a tiny fraction of the price… in theory. The reality of the Videonics video editing system was a jumbled mess of retro tech that took a near-miracle to make your kid’s 8th grade jazz band concert video look a little more polished.

And getting it all to work over 35 years later? It took 8 VCRs, 2 camcorders, 3 Videonics units and 4 remotes to create a 1987-era YouTube masterpiece. But in the end, it revealed the beauty and drive of the first-generation analog filmmakers and videographers who made YouTube possible for all of us.

GummyRoach:
Weird Paul:
TechnologyConnections:

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I traveled to Vienna, Austria to meet Florian “Doc” Kaps – the man behind ‘The Impossible Project’ that saved Polaroid from the dustbin of history. With his guidance and his private store of old Polaroid video tapes, perhaps I would be able to record a modern YouTube video with my vintage Polavision camera.

Through it all, Doc immersed me into his world of analog technology and the philosophy behind his mission to re-integrate analog into our daily lives. We cut lacquer records, we felt the fires of an analog restaurant, and we spent too much time trying to resurrect a relic of the past – because technology, vintage and modern, is all about people.

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A global team of 287 researchers have combined over 100 terabytes of data to create a full map of a fruit fly’s brain, which includes 139,255 individual neurons and 50 million connections. Popular Science, “Scientists mapped every neuron of an adult animal’s brain for the first time”: #science #sciencefacts #weirdscience #biology #research

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A global team of 287 researchers have combined over 100 terabytes of data to create a full map of a fruit fly’s brain, which includes 139,255 individual neurons and 50 million connections.

Popular Science, “Scientists mapped every neuron of an adult animal’s brain for the first time”:

#science #sciencefacts #weirdscience #biology #research