If you’ve got the latest and greatest smartphone, you should step up your photography game to match. So here are some tips that will take your snapshot game from amateur to amazing.

Smartphone cameras have only gotten more phenomenal in the past few years, with companies beefing up photo resolution, adding more lenses, and integrating photo storage options that keep you snapping without fear of filling your camera roll. Ask anyone with an Instagram account and you’ll soon discover the camera is the killer feature on any smartphone.

Start With A Clean Slate

Before you shoot a single picture, you’ll want to make sure your gear is in order. Often, that means doing a bit of pre-shot cleaning.

• While wiping your lens on your jeans might do the job, using coarse materials, like a cotton shirt, or a napkin you dipped in water, may end up damaging your lens over time.
• If you’d like to keep scratches at bay, use a softer material — like a microfiber cloth — to clean any smudges off your camera lens.

A little framing goes a long way

Artfully framing shots may require a more creative state of mind, but that doesn’t mean you have to line everything up all by yourself. Luckily, you can employ your camera to assist you when it comes to framing and composing your shots.

• In iOS, visit Settings and select Camera. From there, enable “Grid” to deploy a rule-of-thirds overlay in the Camera app. That grid will help you better compose your image, and keep your shot parallel with any vertical or horizontal lines in your shot.
• On Android devices, visit Settings > Apps > Camera, and select “Grid Lines” to choose between a rule-of-thirds overlay or a square overlay for perfectly framed Instagram images.

Ditch the digital zoom

As much as you’d love to get a closer look at that dog across the field, you might have to be content with a picture. But zooming in before you take the shot is not the solution.

• Digital zoom shots are simply cropped and resized images, unlike the optical zoom functionality you might find on a full-blown camera.
• Digital zoom will not only yield a grainy image, it will reduce the resolution of the overall photo and exacerbate any vibrations from your hands, leaving you with an inferior representation of that adorable canine. That includes shots taken on phones with multiple camera lenses, like the iPhone XS or Samsung Galaxy Note 10+.
• In general, avoid digital zoom as often as possible — but knock yourself out with the telephoto lens on your smartphone, if it has one.

Look for light before making your own

The flash of an LED light from a smartphone doesn’t flatter anyone, no matter what pose you’re striking. And that glaring light coming from a single source will more often than not give your images a harsh, odd-colored look compared to light being diffused from one or multiple sources.

Instead of depending on an underpowered light to properly illuminate your subject, try to find other sources of light you can use, be it the waning sun, some indoor lights, or even some candlelight if you want to get artsy with it. If you’re really at a loss for light, you could always employ another smartphone’s flashlight mode to provide a more consistent light source. 

Or tell your (Android) phone to take a picture

Since your smartphone’s already constantly listening, waiting for you to demand its attention, why not make it take your selfies, too?

• On Android smartphones, you can ask your Google Assistant to take a photo, selfie, or timed image and watch your smartphone open the camera app.
• On Google’s Pixel smartphones, you can have Google automatically detect the perfect moment for a photo, be it a big smile or a kiss, thanks to its AI-powered face detection features like Top Shot and Photobooth.
• On iOS, Siri will open the camera app for you, though you’ll have to press the button yourself.