11 Simple Tips to Capture Professional Photos With Your Phone

Summary

Alex Armitage breaks down 11 simple ways to make phone photos look more intentional and professional. Starting with a mindset shift from casual snapshots to crafted images, he recommends using a dedicated camera app, turning on grid lines, and shooting in RAW for more editing flexibility. He then demonstrates practical field techniques like cleaning your lens, holding the phone like a real camera, protecting highlights and shadows, finding a subject and shooting it from multiple angles, and using only the lenses built into your phone instead of pinching to zoom. The video also covers a fun long-exposure phone app, emphasizes how important lighting is for different styles of photography, and finishes with a simple Lightroom Mobile edit to show how editing can improve a RAW file and help you learn from your photos.

Highlights

• Starting with a photography mindset changes everything about how you shoot your phone pics mindset shift! 📱
• Grid lines help straighten horizons and improve composition like a mini pro mode guide 🟦
• RAW gives you more room to recover bright skies and dark shadows later 🌤️
• A clean lens and steady two-handed grip instantly level up image quality 🧼
• Finding one subject and shooting it from different positions makes the photo feel way more creative 🎯
• Using the phone’s real lenses beats pinch-to-zoom every time for sharper images 📷
• A handheld long-exposure app can create dreamy effects without a tripod or ND filters 🌊
• Good lighting can make an ordinary scene look cinematic and intentional ✨
• Lightroom Mobile is shown as an easy first step into real editing and color control 🎨

Key Takeaways

• Reset your mindset and shoot with intention instead of just snapping memories 📸
• Use a dedicated camera app and enable grid lines to improve composition and control 🧭
• Shoot in RAW so you have more flexibility when editing later 🎛️
• Clean your lens and hold your phone like a real camera for sharper results ✨
• Let shadows stay shadowy when mood and contrast matter 🌗
• Photograph one subject from five different angles to make it more interesting 🔄
• Only use the actual lenses on your phone instead of digital zoom for better quality 🔍
• Lighting matters most, so aim for golden hour or soft diffused light when possible 🌅
• Edit your photos, especially RAW files, to learn and bring out the best in your shots 🛠️

Overview

The video opens by reframing phone photography as more than just taking quick snapshots. Alex encourages viewers to slow down, think like photographers, and use a dedicated camera app so the act of opening the app signals that it’s time to create something intentional. From there, he introduces helpful settings like grid lines and RAW capture, both of which make it easier to compose stronger images and edit them later without losing quality.

Once outside, the lesson becomes hands-on. He shows how small habits like cleaning the lens, using both hands, and avoiding accidental finger coverage can improve results right away. Then he focuses on exposure and shadows, explaining that phones often over-brighten dark areas, while photography sometimes benefits from keeping shadows moody and dramatic. The viewer also sees a practical challenge: photograph the same subject from multiple angles using different framing ideas, distances, and lenses to make the scene more compelling.

The final section shifts to lighting and editing. Alex explains that light is one of the biggest factors in photography, whether you want soft portrait light, harsh street contrast, or warm golden hour tones. He then walks through a basic edit in Lightroom Mobile, showing how RAW files respond better than the built-in phone editor. The takeaway is simple: better phone photos come from intention, light, composition, and a little editing—not just from having a good camera.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction: Shooting Phone Photos With Intention The speaker introduces the video’s goal: helping viewers take better phone photos by thinking like photographers rather than casual snapshooters. He explains that the lesson will cover phone settings, composition, story, and lighting, while also demonstrating the ideas with Sophia, who has little photography experience.
• 02:30 - 05:00: Tip 1-2: Clean the Lens and Use a Dedicated Camera App The chapter introduces the Reflex camera app and explains that while it includes advanced controls like ISO, exposure compensation, manual focus, and white balance, beginners can still shoot automatically. The main recommended app setting is enabling grid lines to help straighten horizons, improve composition, and support the rule of thirds. The speaker emphasizes that using a dedicated camera app helps shift the user into a photography mindset, encouraging slower, more intentional shooting.
• 05:00 - 07:30: Tip 3-4: Control Focus/Exposure and Shoot in RAW The instructor turns on RAW shooting and transitions into taking photos, emphasizing a few practical habits before shooting: clean the lens, hold the phone like a real camera with two hands, and avoid blocking the lens with a finger. The main creative lesson is to let shadows stay dark instead of forcing every part of the image to be bright, because mood and contrast matter in street photography. The chapter also explains that while phones can adjust brightness, the app’s exposure controls—especially the EV slider or manual shutter speed adjustments—make it easier to fine-tune exposure for scenes where contrast and shadow detail are important.
• 07:30 - 10:00: Tip 5-6: Find a Subject and Explore Multiple Angles The speaker introduces the idea of choosing a subject that genuinely interests you, rather than taking a single quick photo and moving on. They explain that the goal is to photograph the same subject in multiple ways—such as from a lower angle, through foreground elements like foliage, or by changing position based on light and shadows—to make the image more engaging.
• 10:00 - 12:30: Tip 7-8: Use Native Focal Lengths and Creative Long Exposures The speaker encourages using the camera’s native focal lengths only—such as ultra-wide, wide, and telephoto—rather than pinch-to-zoom. They demonstrate how changing focal lengths and framing can create stronger compositions, including using grid lines, positioning the subject between elements, and shooting from a low angle to make a more interesting image.
• 12:30 - 17:30: Tip 9-10: Light Makes the Photo and Start Thinking Like an Editor The chapter begins by showing a handheld long-exposure photo app that uses AI to mimic tripod-and-ND-filter shots, then transitions into the idea that light is the key ingredient in photography, especially for landscape and street images.
• 17:30 - 22:30: Tip 11: Simple Mobile Editing Workflow in Lightroom The speaker explains why Lightroom mobile is preferable to the phone’s built-in photo editor for raw images: it handles raw files better and offers more room to grow into more advanced editing later on. They demonstrate the difference by comparing edits in the iPhone Photos app versus Lightroom, showing that Lightroom preserves detail and gives more control over exposure.
• 22:30 - 25:00: Wrap-Up: Reviewing Results and Final Takeaways The speaker reflects on the need to keep searching for the right visual element and then critiques the current clip composition, noting that the bottom half of the frame and the right-side framing were not intentional artistic choices. After confirming there was no creative reason or preference for how it looked, the speaker decides the clip should be scrapped and cut by the editor.

11 Simple Tips to Capture Professional Photos With Your Phone Transcription

• Segment 1: 00:00 - 02:30 welcome back everyone today I'm going to be covering a bunch of simple topics to take your phone photos from amateur to professional I'm a full-time landscape photographer and today I am joined by the beautiful talented Sophia how much do you know about photography nothing absolutely nothing that's perfect so Sophia is going to be here and she's probably going to end up asking me some questions that you might be asking yourself so I'm going to take you and her and we're going to go through and talk about things like settings in your phone to take better images we're going to talk about resetting your mind so you can think and photograph with more intention and most importantly we're going to be covering topics such as composition and story and lighting which is where phone photography flourishes so what do you want to shoot some mountains mountains you know we're in Ottawa right oh where you're from it's a it's a cleared it's a cleared we're going to go sh shoot some buildings there there's no mountains and there's there's no [Music] clouds all right so up until this point what are the type of images that you take with your phone uh food friends anything for the men's okay so you associate taking images with your phone with just snapshots of your life memories and stuff like that when you take your phone out you're not thinking like what is how am I taking this photo and from like a photography standpoint from an artistic standpoint right exactly that's a great example and it's one of the best tips I have in this entire video is resetting your brain to shoot with intention that means when you take your phone out you think about what you're doing the intention is to craft an image to to be artistic not just a snapshot and that's something you're going to have to do and we're going to talk about it throughout this video is just reassociating your mind that you
• Segment 2: 00:00 - 02:30 can still take snapshot images but you also when you're out shooting photography or you're trying to learn or you're trying to better your your craft and your art shoot with intention and one of the absolute best ways to do that is with my second tip it's to use a dedicated camera app and kindly today's video is actually sponsored by reflex which is a pro camera app that you can use on your iPhone but regardless of if you're using an iPhone or an Android just having a dedicated camera app is one of the best ways to tell your mind that when you take out the camera it being your phone and you open up that app that's when you're going to start thinking I'm shooting photography and you can still use your basic camera app that comes with your phone as your memories or your food photos or your friends and stuff like that and that's going to rewire your brain to think okay I'm out here to learn and shoot photography that means you're going to take better photos because you're actually thinking about it from a photography standpoint and you're not
• Segment 3: 02:30 - 05:00 thinking about it like a phone so let me show you a few of the really cool features that reflex has and then we're going to talk about some of the settings you can change in your phone to take better images as well okay all right so go ahead and open up reflex really quick and you're going to notice that there's a lot of different settings going on in here like ISO EV MF which is manual focus or white balance these are a bunch of settings that you don't necessarily need to know if you're just getting started however as you learn photography more this is going to get your feet wet for what those things are but the best part is that you can still shoot automatically we don't have to worry about things like all of those settings if we don't want to within the app the biggest setting we want to change is we want to turn on our grid lines so you're going to do that by coming up here tapping that button and doing this a lot of the times The Horizon isn't straight or your lines in the the image are not straight and but I've seen a lot of your photos you could definitely benefit from grid lines so using these grid lines is going to help you straighten your images but it's also going to help you guide where some of your subject matter should be in your images using the rule of thirds which is something we'll talk about a little bit later but we're not going to focus too heavily on it regardless the best part about this particular app or any app in general is that it's going to reset your brain to think I'm now shooting photography and that's what's really important is getting in the mindset slowing down and shooting with intention when you take out this app you don't have to use all the settings if you don't want to but they're there when you start asking questions of well I I want to control things a little bit more manually or I want to do things like one of the coolest features of this
• Segment 4: 02:30 - 05:00 particular app is that you can set the focus point and the exposure at two different points cuz you know how normally when you click on your phone it'll focus on that point and expose for that point but what if that Point's way too bright and then everything else is dark even though that's where you want it focused with this app you can actually control both of them any questions how much math do I have to do uh uh how much math do you want to do I can do some math but I don't want to do a lot of math there's no math it's okay so the next setting we're going to want to change is we're going to be shooting in raw what what does that mean realistically we'll just keep it simple is that if you plan on editing your images which we're going to do at the end of this video shooting in raw just gives you more data to work with that means that if we shoot an image and it's too dark or it's too bright we have a higher chance to be able to recover some of that Darkness to be able to see into it or recover some of that brightness to bring down the exposure of that image when we shoot in raw so to do that
• Segment 5: 05:00 - 07:30 you're just going to see that H if thing right here you're just going to click on that and we're going to be shooting in raw today okay all right so now that we got our settings dialed in why don't we go take some photos this is not what I had in [Music] mind what are you shooting there this building this building yeah what about it the reflections on it are really neat Okay so before you take that shot I'm going to tell you another tip okay before you ever take a photo okay is to clean your lenses with my t-shirt your T-shirt Works preferably a lens cloth but if your t-shirt's all you have then that's what we have that's all I got okay and the next thing is you have to treat your phone like a camera when you're taking the photos two hands and then the other biggest thing is make sure that you're not blocking the lenses with your finger I do that all the time time okay now you're ready to take a photo ready all right here we [Music] go the next tip is to let Shadows be shadows right now if you open your phone photos and scroll through them you're likely going to notice that our phones hate having any detail be in darkness or shadow this is great when you're trying to take a selfie or capture a memory but it's not always what we want in photography especially street photography where Darkness shadows and mood Thrive iPhones do have a way to control the brightness of your image but honestly it's not a great experience to use reflex makes it a lot easier it gives us the ability to control exposure using the EV slider or manually controlling our shutter speed to brighten or darken the image like you're seeing Sophia do right now this won't be something you use all the time but is especially critical in moments like this
• Segment 6: 05:00 - 07:30 where we're trying to capture contrast over anything [Music] else daylight and it begins to Glow yeah looks so Bri going to watch it grow so let the sunrise remind you yes today all right how you feeling so far good funun fun yes oh you're not tired
• Segment 7: 07:30 - 10:00 of me yet okay so my next tip for you is to find a subject because i' I've watched you capture images stop and be like I'm going to take a photo of this and then kind of keep walking what I want you to do next is find something that really interests you and shoot it five different ways what do you mean by that the one thing you can do is get lower to the ground okay something else you can try is shooting through something else like foliage or some kind of frame or you can try just moving around the object based off of the light in the shadows that are on the object so let's do that we're going to challenge you to find five different angles of the same subject okay if you're enjoying this I made a cheat cheet that covers many of the topics from this video as a quick reference guide and it's completely free you can find that link down in the description below the like button we are kind of running out of light so I have offered to Sophia to cheat a little bit I'm going to help her guide her through the five different angles and we have chosen this building behind us as our subject what is this building West Block West Parliament Parliament cuz Ottawa is the capital of Canada that's true fun fact Ottawa is the capital of Canada M okay so what you're going to do I want you to walk up to this shot and just take the shot that you normally would okay what's your image of right now uh just the building just the building yeah okay all right so that's one angle let's take it from four different other angles I want you to go underneath that tree over there and then we're going to use the top of the tree to frame out the top of the image so that you don't have this blue sky as the top and we create something more in the foreground makes a little bit more interest in the image by just adding that tree to the top of the image okay all right so what's your image now I've got some tree uhhuh and
• Segment 8: 07:30 - 10:00 the building what do you think of that compared to your last image it's more interesting okay so that's your second shot nice we got to find three more okay all right so how many steps did you just take away from where the last image you took 10 or so 10 yeah all right so go up to these bushes here and shoot through the leaves through the leaves that's cool what do you think of that it's so much more interesting all right we have two more angles two more angles what did you find over here there's this fence with these spires that are pointy and interesting it looks like it's in jail well that could be a commentary like what if you wanted to say that the Parliament building is the Canadian government is representing jail oh this is getting too political it's okay I don't know what I'm talking about we
• Segment 9: 10:00 - 12:30 should we should steer away from this I think you're currently having a problem where you're not tall enough to get the the angles that you want give me a boost here like this and so something I'm trying to do is not overlap this with the building and kind of have it evenly spaced and we're just trying to create something more interesting than what we were shooting before neat that counts it's not necessarily a great image we've got one more what else should we do let's go down okay what's your shot we've got lampost we've got Double Tree and the biggest Spire oh that's cool so you're framing your shot with that left tree and then the right tree yeah and then the center of your frame is the lamp post and the Spire yeah are the grid lines helping with that they are now that I remember to use them last time I was like how are the grid lines and she's like oh I think I turned them off she goes to check she's like oh no they were on I just ignored them let's try one bonus one so come up to this pattern here yeah let's find and use the ultra wide get your camera really low to the ground with the ultra wide and try to put that pattern in the bottom half of the grid how's that look what does that look like cool you can even because it's a phone you can even turn the phone upside down and shoot it that way I don't know how close you need to get to the you don't get credit for that one though okay she gets credit for that one though after that look all right so you just took the same subject five different ways actually you got it six different ways there at the end what was the result how does it make you feel about the photos you were taking of something you would normally just walk up take your phone out and take a snapshot of it was definitely harder than I thought it would be to find all these different angles that I
• Segment 10: 10:00 - 12:30 actually liked but I think the photo turned out more interesting than just the building as is so challenging yourself showed you different angles different techniques trying different I saw you were switching focal lengths on the camera from like the telephoto and the wide angle so one of my other tips is to never use a lens that doesn't exist on your camera what I mean by that if you hold this up it's got three different lenses on it so it's got an ultra wide a telephoto and just the main camera the trick is only ever use those lenses whatever it may be whether it's one two or three that you have on your camera so I've always told you that is that when you're shooting on one don't pinch and zoom always just use the
• Segment 11: 12:30 - 15:00 built-in focal length of the camera that's going to give you the best quality yeah you do always say that I [Music] do all right these swirling bubbles are actually a great way to talk about today's sponsor which is reflex which is the app that we've been using throughout this entire video however they make other apps which is really cool in the photography space for your phone and they have one that we can do long exposures handheld no tripod necessary normally long exposures where you get things like moving water uh moving clouds or these swirling Bubbles and patterns in the water requires you to use a tripod a big camera and these things called ND filters but instead we can actually just use this app that's going to be on your phone and as long as you hold it still it is going to create using AI technology or some voodoo magic and it's going to be able to make it where it actually creates the same type of images and the same patterns in the app you want to give it a try sure it's good I don't have a tripod or an indie filter do you even know what that is nope you don't you don't know what a tripod is okay let's go try it the app is super simple there's only basically two settings which is what camera you want to use and how long you want to set the exposure for so you just slide that back and forth to set the exposure and it's as simple as that and then once you take the image you want to hold it still as best as possible so you could technically take the image right here and hold the camera still but I'm actually going to suggest since we have it is just going down a little bit and holding putting your hands on that railing so that it's a little more stable and then taking your image 15 seconds you think is good 20 seconds let's try 20 let's do 20 so you just pressed the button now you're holding
• Segment 12: 12:30 - 15:00 still I'm holding still and it's doing its magic oh what do you think cool that's pretty cool that is cool all so this app is called rehel it was a ton of fun to use super easy and the results took this okay image and turned into something that looks like we did not take with our phone it's made by reflex they make a bunch of other apps for your phone to do specialized stuff for phone photography check those out with the link down below thank you again let's get back to more of the video all right so we've pretty much run out of good light for street photography although we are coming into some of my favorite light for landscape photography which is sunset which I know that you love waking up for Sunrise um no are you cold [Laughter]
• Segment 13: 15:00 - 17:30 that brings me to my next point which is going to be that lighting is everything in photography you're going to hear this basically any video you watch is that lighting is probably the most important single subject when it comes to photography so if you're a landscape photographer doing things like waking up for Sunrise or sunset during golden hour is going to help enhance a lot of your images but if you're a portrait photographer or you're trying to shoot people a lot of the times you're going to want to shoot people through things like diffused light or overcast light and the reason that's going to happen is right now if you look at Sophia's beautiful face you can see that she has some very even light on her instead of those dark harsh Shadows that you would get with direct light that comes from this nice diffused light that we're getting right now where you don't see a lot of Shadows on the ground and you just don't have a lot of Shadows on anything which is technically kind of bad for street photography which is what we were going for so that's another one if you're shooting street photography you want Long Shadows you want downtown with bright sunlight so you can get all that dark contrast to shoot in things like black and white or really bring the contrast up in your images but the whole point is no matter what you're shooting lighting is everything lighting is going to be the most important thing in your photography it's something that we could spend an entire I could have an entire course on it and there's probably plenty of videos you can watch just on lighting but just a touch on the subject try shooting at different times of day rather than during midday which is typically the worst light and that's also the time that a lot of people shoot their phone photos because they're out at noon exploring around shooting things on their phone but if you think more about
• Segment 14: 15:00 - 17:30 the light that you have the light that you're getting and the light that you want in your image again I'll use sunset and sunrise you're going to take better images during those times if you push yourself to be up for Sunrise you want to be up for Sunrise no thank you how about Sunset like right now I can do that good Sunset right now lighting that's a huge [Music] one and we're back are you ready to edit yes Okay cool so in this video we're only going to be covering or just getting our feet wet with editing it's not going to be an editing tutorial because there's just way too much to talk about however right here on YouTube actually right here on this channel you can find a ton of editing tips and tricks I wanted to bring it up in this video because it's important to edit your photos one of the best things about editing your photos is it makes you go through them and review them so that you can learn from the mistakes that you made out in the field if you don't edit your photos you never take the time to go back and look at the images you took furthermore it's really important to edit your photos because when you take
• Segment 15: 17:30 - 20:00 images especially raw images those aren't meant to just be posted those are meant to be edited at least in some way adding contrast back in or saturation all right so the app we're going to be using is Lightroom mobile which you've probably heard me talk about the full version plenty of times but I'm not choosing this app because it's necessarily the best app for editing on your phone I'm choosing this app because it's one of the better apps to grow into so if you keep shooting photography and you keep editing using the free version of Lightroom on your phone it's going to get your feet wet and kind of show you exactly the same things that you can new on the phone that you might end up using on a computer later down the road so let's jump into Lightroom and start editing a photo all right so go ahead and open up Lightroom why don't we just edit it in the photos app okay let me show you open up your photos real quick okay and what photo do you want to edit uh this one okay do you remember how we shot in raw mhm all right so the photo editing app that's built into your iPhone is not great it's not very fully featured but also it doesn't handle raws very well so click on edit and I'm going to show you and then go to exposure that's second icon and then just move your exposure up or down do you see how that blue part immediately becomes white pretty quickly and it just kind of completely gets rid of all the color and this looks really muddy oh yeah okay hit cancel and then open up Lightroom real quick and now go to light and then adjust this exposure in here do you see how the exposure is completely different here and how it's adjusting it go down to where it's lower do you remember when you brought the exposure down earlier it just looked like a muddy mess this is complet completely different like you can actually see the light in the the lamp post there and you get all the details in the sky whereas before
• Segment 16: 17:30 - 20:00 nothing was happening yeah that's why we're using Lightroom or a different editing app than the one that's buil-in don't use the built-in editing app okay all right so to reset this you can just double tap on exposure and now we're going to edit the photo what do you want to do to it um I think the sky looks too bright okay so let's go into our exposure we can bring that down just a little but we don't want to bring it down too too much we want to focus on just the highlights that's good so now go to Highlights and bring down your highlights and that's going to mainly focus on this area over here and then let's bring up your shadows that's looking pretty good and then let's add some contrast to the image now we can do that in two ways you can either do the contrast slider there or go up here to the curves adjustment and then we can add a couple points on this curves adjustment and this is a way to manually control adding in contrast your image again this is not something you have to understand yet however
• Segment 17: 20:00 - 22:30 what's really cool is you're like what are curves I want to learn what curves adjustments are you can go on YouTube or this channel right here and you can search what are curves how do what a curves do and you can learn all about specifically just this tool and you can do it one piece at a time you don't have to be overwhelmed with everything so all we're going to do to add some contrast in is we're going to point that point here I'm going to point this point up and then I'm going to bring up the blacks a little and it's going to give a kind of a film look so bringing up this Point here do you see how the Shadows here are now starting to look a little washed out it's got kind of that film look let's go with that just to just for [Music] fun and what else do we want to do let's do a nice little vignette here and I would just bring it down that's going to darken the edges what's a vignette a vignette is just going to darken or brighten the edges if you want to learn what it is go to effects and change it and see what happens oh right so that's a vignette M A lot of the times you see really extreme ones on like some tacky wedding photos and stuff like that you know what I'm talking about M so we just want a little bit normally if we had the paid version I would use a radial mask which again you can learn as you want to learn uh and it gives you more control over what we're doing it looks good yeah do you like the edit I do cool and that's just using the mobile version of Lightroom that's free now obviously you can unlock some more powerful tools if you need them but I have a surprise for you I edited one of your photos on my laptop using the full version of Lightroom okay so this was the image that you took mhm and this was my edit ooh that's an image you took neat Isn't that cool yeah it looks good all right so what did you think of
• Segment 18: 20:00 - 22:30 editing the final edit it was fun pretty simple right yeah do you think it's worth editing your photos for sure I always thought it was more work so I never did it I mean obviously I just I guided you on what to do so it only took a couple minutes but a lot of the times editing is pretty pretty simple yeah exactly the hack is having me oh okay I'll take the photos you just send them to me to edit yes please I charge by the hour okay anyways if you enjoyed this video make sure you comment down below thank you Sophia cuz this could not have happened without her so thank you it means the world that you were willing to help and willing to be the guinea pig of learning photography here on the channel yeah so thank thank you thank you for tuning in thank you for being here as
• Segment 19: 22:30 - 25:00 always there's got to be re about there somewhere you just got to find it later this one why did you have this bottom half in the frame going to the right part of the frame you didn't artistically choose that for any reason no you didn't like how it looked no okay scrap this clip editor cut this one out