Some Quick Phone Tips: Taking Photos of Kids

My sister has three crazy littles that run around like the wild and beautiful creatures they were born to be. It makes it a little hard to take nice photos of them, though, so she recently asked me how in the heck I get nice photos of my kid on my phone. She said she likes to take lots of pictures of her kids but they move around a lot (I can attest this is true), so she wanted to know a few tips for how to take a not blurry photo using her iPhone.

Every kid moves at different speeds, and I'm no expert on phones, but I'm a pretty decent picture taker, so I'm sharing this in hopes that it might help someone else. These are the tips I gave my sister:

GOOD LIGHTING

First, because you don't have a lot of settings you can adjust, you need to make sure you have good lighting. Even indoors can be too dark if you aren't by a window or something. You want as much light (natural is best) as possible. Information for your photo is stored in the form of light, so the more light you have in a picture, the more information is it storing, so it can contain more details


FOCUS BOX

Another trick I use on my phone is to tap the screen where my subject is. It puts a little box around the place I tapped which tells my phone that is the subject on my screen that I want to focus on. The square will lock in on your subject even if you move around a bit, so it might also follow moving subjects to an extent.. Your phone should automatically adjust the focus to be on the subject with the yellow box around it.


SHUTTER TIMING

Another thing that might be useful to know is that your phone takes a picture when your finger lifts from the shutter button, not the instant you push the button. I know it's only like a second of a difference but if you know how that works it could help you understand how to better time your photos.


ZOOMING OUT

Another thing to consider is that the more zoomed in you are, the more pixelated or blurry your photo will be. Try to keep your camera zoomed out as much as possible. You can always crop your photo to be smaller or more zoomed in later, but if you don't take a large photo to begin with, you don't have a lot of info stored in your picture and can't zoom in without compromising your details.


EDIT THAT SUCKER

The last thing I do is edit and adjust my pictures. I can change color, brightness, contrast, saturation, focus points...it's how I turn my ok pictures into magical ones. I use Instagram for editing the photos before I post them but there are hundreds of photo editing apps at your disposal. You can also edit your phone photos on your computer. I edit my other digital photos in Photoshop, but your computer should have at least one basic photo editing program that came with the software. Editing photos makes your pictures look professional, for sure.


ALSO, TAKE MULTIPLES

I didn't share this with my sis, but taking multiple photos will allow for mistakes and blurry photos. Not every picture is going to be blur-free, even for professional and well-seasoned phone photographers, but if you take 10 shots instead of 1, the chances of having a non-blurry photo seem to be a little higher.


Those are the thoughts I shared with my sister at least. Did you find them helpful? Do you have any other phone tip wisdom that someone trying to capture moving kids might find helpful?