Phone Photos That Don't Look Like Phone Photos

Most small businesses in Delhi already own a camera good enough for their website, their catalogue and their Instagram feed. It is in their pocket. The gap between a photo that looks like a shop owner took it on a phone and one that looks like it cost money is almost never the phone. It is three decisions made before you press the button: where the light is coming from, what is behind the subject, and how far away you stand.

Get those three right and the phone's software — which is doing an enormous amount of processing you never see — will handle the rest. Get them wrong and no amount of editing rescues the shot.

Light does most of the work

A phone sensor is small. Small sensors need light, and they need it to be soft and coming from a sensible direction. Two things go wrong in almost every bad business photo, and both are about light.

The first is direction. Indoors, the best free light source you have is a window or a shop shutter during the day. Put the subject beside it, not in front of it and not with their back to it. If the window is behind the subject, the phone exposes for the bright window and your product or your staff member goes dark. If the window is directly behind you and you are shooting straight at the subject, the light is flat and the photo looks like a passport photo. Light from the side gives you shadow, and shadow is what makes a jar of pickle or a stitched kurta look three-dimensional instead of pasted on.

The second is hardness. Direct sun between roughly eleven and three creates shadows with knife edges — under the nose, under a product's rim, across half a signboard. The same sun bouncing off a white wall, or coming through a thin curtain, or on an overcast day, is soft. Soft is almost always what you want for products and for people. If you must shoot outdoors in the middle of the day, move into open shade: under an awning, on the shadow side of the building, in a doorway. Open shade at noon is better light than direct sun at noon, every time.

The other light problem is specific to Indian interiors and nobody talks about it: mixed colour temperature. A cool white tubelight, a warm yellow bulb and daylight from a window are three different colours. The phone's white balance has to pick one, and the parts of the frame lit by the others go blue or orange. The fix costs nothing — switch off the ceiling tubelight and shoot on window light alone, or switch off the window by moving away from it and shoot on the tubelight alone. One light source, one colour.

Two thumb techniques worth learning

• Tap to expose, then lock. Tap the subject on screen; most phones then show a small slider you can drag to make the shot brighter or darker. Press and hold to lock focus and exposure so they stop shifting while you recompose.
• Protect the bright parts. A slightly dark photo can be lifted. A blown-out white — a window, a sunlit wall, a white shirt with no detail left — cannot be recovered, because there is no information there to recover. If the screen shows a burnt-out patch, drag the exposure down.

The background is a decision

Look at your last ten product photos. How many have a tangle of wires, a calendar, a stacked carton, a bit of somebody's arm, or a metal shutter behind the subject? The background is the half of the frame most people never look at until it is on the website.

You have three honest options:

1. Clean and plain. A plain wall, a sheet of white chart paper curved up from a table, a plain kitchen counter. Boring is fine. Boring sells products because the eye has nowhere else to go.
2. Real and deliberate. The workshop, the kitchen, the counter — but tidied for the shot. Context photos build trust in a way white-background photos cannot. The difference between a good context photo and a bad one is sixty seconds of clearing the frame.
3. Separated by distance. Move the subject a few feet away from the wall behind it. Distance plus a longer lens makes the background go soft naturally, without portrait mode.

On portrait mode: it is software guessing where the subject ends. It guesses well on a face against a distant background and badly on hair, on handles, on the spout of a teapot, on anything with a gap in it. Zoom in and check the edges before you publish. If the outline looks cut out with scissors, shoot it normally instead.

Framing: distance, height and the edges

Distance. The main lens on a phone is wide. Wide lenses stretch whatever is closest to them. That is why close-up selfies make noses look large and why a plate of food shot from six inches away looks like it is falling towards the camera. The fix is to step back and use the 2x or 3x lens if your phone has one. Step back, zoom in. Faces, food and furniture all look more like themselves.

Height. Chest height is the lazy default and it flatters almost nothing. Food and flat-lay products want the camera directly overhead or at a low 20–30 degree angle. People want the camera at their eye level. Rooms and shop interiors want the camera at chest height but held level — tilt the phone up and the vertical lines of the walls lean inwards like the building is collapsing.

The edges. Turn on the grid in your camera settings. It costs nothing and it does two jobs: it keeps your horizon and your shelves straight, and it stops you from centring everything. Before you press the shutter, run your eye once around the four edges of the frame. Half a person, a cropped hand, a pole growing out of a head — these are all edge problems, and they are all visible before you shoot if you look.

Leave a little more space than you think you need. Instagram, a website hero, a Google Business profile and a WhatsApp catalogue all crop to different shapes. A tightly framed shot survives none of them. A slightly loose shot survives all of them.

What not to buy

We could sell you most of this. We would rather you did not waste the money.

• A ring light for product photography. A ring light is designed to put flat, even light on a face for video calls and talking-head video. On a product it produces a distinctive doughnut reflection and kills the shadows that gave the product shape. A window is better and free.
• Preset and filter packs. A preset is a saved set of slider positions made for someone else's lighting. Applied to a mixed-tubelight photo it just makes the colour cast a different colour. The consistency people admire in good feeds comes from shooting in the same light and the same background each time, not from a filter.
• Clip-on phone lenses. The cheap ones sit in front of a lens that has already been optically corrected by the manufacturer, and add flare and soft corners. If you need a wider or longer view, use the other lenses already on the phone.
• A gimbal, if you only shoot stills. Gimbals smooth out walking video. They do nothing for a photograph.
• Automatic background removal for every product. It works on a simple silhouette. On jewellery, on mesh, on anything transparent, it leaves halos and chewed edges that look worse than the original background. Check before you batch a hundred images.

The things worth a small amount of money are unglamorous: a sheet of white chart paper or a roll of plain fabric, a cheap tripod so repeat shots line up, and a white foam board to bounce window light back into the shadow side. That is the whole kit.

Before you post: size and consistency

A photo straight off a modern phone is often three to five megabytes and four or five thousand pixels wide. Upload that to your website and the visitor's phone downloads all of it to display something a few hundred pixels across. Resize the longest edge to around 1,600 pixels for a normal page image, save as JPEG or WebP, and the same picture will usually land under 300KB with no visible difference. This is one of the most common reasons a site feels slow on a mobile connection — worth a look at how your site handles images if you upload a lot of them.

Consistency matters more than perfection for a feed. Pick one background, one time of day and one shooting position, and use them for every product. Ten adequate photos that match each other look more professional than ten good photos that do not. That consistency is also what makes a social feed readable at thumbnail size, where nobody can see your lens quality anyway.

What to do next

Do not reshoot your catalogue this week. Pick your five most important images — the ones on your homepage, your Google Business profile and your top-selling product page — and reshoot only those, applying the three rules: side light from one source, a background you chose, and a step back with the 2x lens.

Compare them side by side with what is currently live. If the difference is obvious to you, it is obvious to a customer, and you now know how to produce the rest yourself. If you would rather someone looked at how your images are being served, sized and used across the site, get in touch and we will go through what you already have before anyone suggests shooting anything new.

Questions we get asked