How To SLAY All Your Photos Without An Expensive Pro Camera [Guest Post]

I know! I know! Tell you something new, but really how much do you understand by lighting? One of the key problems people have taking a great photo is poor lighting. You can have a great “high end” pro cam but terrible lighting will not show its best features. The best type of lighting you can possibly utilize is natural light! The sun can be glorious once used wisely and depending on the kind of photo you want.

When I take my pics I try to bear in mind time of day, due to time of day you have factors like shadows and sweating through your makeup for the perfect #ootd outfit pics to consider. Obviously this tip is best for outside flicks or window captured selfies like my pic above. In cases where you can’t get at the sun, use indoor beam lights or spotlights and for you makeup gurus you can use your ring lights. if you don’t have any indoor lights you can always look to Amazon to find amazing deals. These pictures below are an indoor shot I took (at night) for my friend to help her advertise some of her clothing items. We used one ring light, a backdrop, and our good phone camera. Not too shabby right?

You see all those photographs you glorify on the gram or in fashion magazine? EDITED! The best of the best spend endless time cleaning up and fine tuning photos to perfection, your camera can not do all of the work for you. Take the title to this point lightly, practice editing your pics and comparing them to your previous work to figure out your style and what works best for the kind of shot you take. Honestly, I hate to see pictures over edited, they take away form the beauty of the shot and can come across tacky. Remember LESS IS MORE, simply look for things in your photo you want to mildly enhance, make sharp or simply brighten.

e above are two before and after pics I took of majestic beaches in Barbados! Sometimes your camera, due to pixels, may not see the richness before you. For nature shots, especially as it speaks to ambiance of the day or moment I want to portray, I tend to make the colors pop or I deepen their tone. Key editing tools that help are: saturation, exposure, contrast, temperature or tint (white balance), hue and lightness. I not only take my photos with my phone but I use phone apps to edit. Some of my faves are : VSCO, Afterlight, Factune/Airbrush (great for makeup shots and editing the blemishes) and Snapseed.

An angle can make or break a photo so as Britney Spears best states “You better work bi**h!” Finding the right angle doesn’t come easy, you have to play around with your camera and understand what you are trying to capture. For selfies, it’s good to take from an angle slightly above and not face on; for landscape pics, determine what the pinnacle point you see and wish to highlight; food photos taking directly above aren’t always necessary, your reader may want to see a view slightly lower to envision how appealing the meal looks sitting before you. 

Bonus tip: to optimize selfie pixels, if you’re a pro at taking selfies flip from your front to back camera. The outer camera on phones always have more pixels and makes for a cleaner shot to edit.

I’m just kidding…or am I? Sometimes you don’t get the shot you need the very first time and to prevent breaking your photo ready momentum, take a few snaps of each pose or area and sort them later after your mini photo-shoot. It may be tiresome but you always know at first glance if a photo is a hit or miss. Also if you are not the one talking your pic, this point is great for your friends/fam to adhere to. They will never know what you are trying to capturing so they should take as many snaps possible for you to filter through. If you don’t have a willing friend to go on adventures and take pics for you, having a tripod surely helps!

Whew! Now that was a rant haha! I hope I didn’t bore any of you lovely dolls reading this and I also hope it was insightful. Remember this one rule for sure: be confident in what you do and practice, practice, practice! No one becomes great overnight so play around with your camera and their features.

For me, I like iPhone because of the camera but I know many Samsung users who like their cameras too. And most importantly, NEVER let money deter you from doing something you love. Before I had my XR, I was using my iPhone 5s and I still managed to get fantastic shots.

I’ll drop a few more photos below that a lot of people are amazed I got taken with my phone.