5 ways to photograph #LikeABoss with your phone

Business owners have to be masters of just about everything. You’re an expert in marketing and customer sales. You’re the retail stylist, the janitor, the handyperson. And yes, you also have to be the photographer. If your business has any social presence, you definitely need to have your phone photography skills up to #LikeABoss status.

Simply including an image with your Facebook posts can increase your engagement 2.3 times. Think of your job as making the social sphere a more visually pleasing place. When you’re ready to take some photos, keep these tips in mind.

Explore perspectives

This is not related to your recent trip to the palm reader. Photography is all about playing around and seeing what works best. So shooting from different angles helps you break up your social feeds and make them more interesting. And it allows your customers to see things from a, well, different perspective. Pretend you’re a dog or that you’re wearing stilts – it’s all the easier since you’re using your mobile phone.

Ban zooming and the flash feature

And please, please, please (please, again) don’t use these both at the same time. There’s no excuse to use zoom, unless maybe you’re photographing your child’s play from the nosebleed section. Zooming sacrifices image quality – just get yourself closer to what you want to snap. As for flash, it doesn’t make for an enticing picture, and it’s difficult to edit. Find natural light somewhere, anywhere, and let the sun’s rays guide your pictures to greatness.

Step out of auto  

Most auto features work great for smartphones. But when it’s just not displaying how you’d like, you can indeed be brave enough to explore manual mode. Here’s a quick and dirty roundup of a few features you can toggle manually (read more in-depth here):          

• ISO: The lower the number, the less sensitivity to light, and vice versa. Keeping this low will help your pictures come out less blurry because the shutter speed is faster.         
• White Balance: On most phones, you either have a sliding bar or options to choose from like fluorescent and cloudy, which affects your white balance. Find something white in your photograph and toggle this until it also looks white on your screen.         
• Exposure: Exposure is your smartphone’s way of making up for the fact that it doesn’t have a true camera lens. When playing with the exposure, make sure you don’t take your pictures too brightly, at higher exposure, as you can always brighten them up after.

Edit #LikeABoss

A lot of editing expertise comes from having fun with whatever editing options you have available. Sometimes the editing software that comes on your phone is enough. But there are also multiple free apps available that give you the power to edit as much or as little as you want – some even have preloaded filters. You might have to download a few as you find them and see which ones you like the most.

There’s always stock photography

In the social sphere, you probably don’t want to use stock photos so your followers get the truest glimpse of your business. But for general website or announcement-type messaging, stock photos are readily available, and you can find some in your price range, too. But say you do want real photos of your business. Hiring a professional photographer is well worth the price. In the meantime, you’ve now got the chops to take some spectacular mobile photos.

Check out some other ways to enhance your online marketing #LikeABoss.