Mobile Photography Course
By Hannah Oliveira
As a photographer who works with cameras, I knew it was somewhat normal for me to raise an eyebrow at a cell phone photography course. I wondered, “what will I learn here I haven’t had to already know working with my DSLR?” But alas, I picked up quite a bit of information. The most useful thing though was the advantage of using the built-in camera on Lightroom, and how that allows you to control manually the camera settings.
One of the first things the course introduces is the app, Lightroom. If you’re a photographer or creative, you probably know about this for color correction and adjustment. The tip here was to use the built-in camera on the app to take photos. Usually, I would never think of this as an option, as the camera on an app usually reduces photo quality. Here, however, using the Lightroom camera actually allows us to configure the camera in a more professional way. It also allows us to take photos in RAW, which is a kind of image that stores all the information the camera receives. As opposed to a JPEG, which is a more compressed format, meaning that it takes away some of the information of the photo so that the file size is smaller. When it comes to retouching photos, this is a problem, because you end up losing information.
With the Lightroom camera you can also control the shutter speed. The shutter speed controls how long the lens of the camera stays open, which controls how much light gets in. The quicker the shutter speed, the darker the image will be. So, if you’re going to shoot at a quick shutter speed, you’ll need to have a lot of light. The ability to adjust the camera settings manually in the app makes it so that it’s like you’re shooting with an actual camera, which is what any photographer would probably want. So, if you’re a photographer and for some reason you don’t have your go-to camera on hand, Lightroom’s camera seems to be the next best option.
