Home #withGalaxy Autumn is here: our tips for taking a good photo with your smartphone
This content is courtesy of Samsung and produced by Humanoid xp
The season for autumn walks in the forest is finally here. This is the time of year when the colors of nature are at their most beautiful. It would be a shame not to be able to take a good picture of them with your smartphone.
In autumn, the leaves display their most beautiful colours: yellow, orange and sometimes even red, and offer us striking landscapes. If the ambient temperature begins to drop, the warm tones of fall make this season a favorite with photographers.
And the smartphone is the best pocket companion to capture all these moments with spontaneity. If you’re not quite sure how to bring out all those fall colors, now’s the time to follow our tips and tricks. We walked around Canada with a Samsung Galaxy S22+ in our hands, here is the result.
The main sensor of the Samsung Galaxy S22+
The main sensor of the Samsung Galaxy S22+
The Samsung Galaxy S22+ is equipped with a 50 megapixel main sensor. It offers very good sharpness and consistent colorimetry. Perfect for capturing forests in autumn!
Leaves are the stars of the season
Photographing the leaves may seem downright trivial. However, they are indeed the stars of the season since without their change of color, autumn would not be what it is. So have fun photographing them, capturing their shapes, their colors, hold them in your hand, walk past a light source. Make it your main subject, take beautiful macro photos, bring out the veins, etc. There is enough to make a superb shoot with simple leaves.
In the first image, we used the Portrait mode of the Samsung Galaxy S22+ to achieve a digital blur and highlight the leaves in the foreground.
You can then integrate human subjects as we did with the following photos by hiding a face with leaves for example. Throwing leaves in the air can also add movement and dynamism to your images. In these cases, remember to focus in the right place, because the one automatically proposed is not always adapted to the desired rendering.
For the next first shot, we’ve highlighted the gaze through a single leaf with Portrait mode adding bokeh to the foreground.
For the second, it is on the sheet that we took stock rather than on the person. It’s up to you to determine what to highlight in your shot.
Autumn is the season of contrasts
Orange and blue are two complementary colors, that is, they reinforce and enhance each other. So if the blue sky is there, take advantage of it for your autumn photos. This naturally accentuates the orange color of the leaves and brings contrast to your image without much effort.
Finally, the contrasts generated by natural light give your image even more cachet if you play with shadows. Especially since the raking light of autumn is the best for photography.
We hid the sun behind the leaves to limit the backlight and clearly see the shadows of the trees on the ground, while keeping the sky blue to accentuate the colors.
Apart from autumn foliage, the orange color is rare in the natural environment. Its explosive aspect can then be easily highlighted, even if the sky is not blue. In this case, a wall or a building may just do the trick and be very effective.
Retouching to sublimate autumn
The colors generated by your camera may look a little faded compared to the real ones. If so, don’t be ashamed to go through the editing box to give your photos a new shine. Samsung’s photo gallery includes sufficient tools for this type of editing, but you can also use a dedicated application, which will be more complex to use. We recommend the free Snapseed app.
With Snapseed, here’s how we improved our photo in 3 steps:
by adjusting the basic exposure settings such as contrast, warmth (or color temperature) which you can pull towards warm tones or even saturation which you can slightly raise without exaggerating. The more seasoned can also play with the curve tool which varies the contrast of the different areas of the image, from dark tones to light tones. It is difficult to learn, but nothing prevents you from manipulating it at random to experiment. Finally, you are free to add an additional filter to add even more character. As with the saturation setting, be satisfied with a slight intensity setting so that the rendering remains natural.
Here is another example with the Samsung photo editor built into the Galaxy S22+. Here we changed the exposure settings and added a warming filter.
Autumn is easy to photograph
The fall colors are so beautiful that it’s pretty easy to get some pretty shots. But by applying our advice, you can go even further and achieve striking photos.
Before you start shooting, never forget to define what the main subject is. Then, you just have to play with the colors and the raking light to refine your framing. And if the result is not as beautiful as reality, add a little warmth to your photo from an editing tool that will revive the colors of autumn.
