Photography with Android: 5 tips to make your Photo pop

We’re going to show you a few tips and tricks to give your photos a twist. All of these can be accomplished with most Android smartphones currently available on the market and require either no financial investment at all or at the very least, a small one. For most of them, they’re relatively simple but will also require the photographer to have a good eye for photos as well as a few applications that can edit photos.

photos 1 — The Nexus 5 in a mug, the poor man's underwater photography hack.

As a testament to just how easy it can be to get some relatively spectacular photos from your Android device, just have a look at some of the examples. I am by no means an expert in photography, but I do enjoy playing around with different shots, filters, and edits. All in all, if you’re passionate about taking photos, hopefully some of these tips will help you out.

Reflection of lenses

If you’ve got a pair of sunglasses with a reflective coating on the lens, you can capture a good perspective on some shots. Of course, this doesn’t need to be unique to just sunglasses but can be used with ski goggles as well, as long as there is some kind of reflective surface to go off of. A good tip for this is that you should always have the light source being reflected off the lens so that you can better capture whatever scene or action in your view.

photos 2 — A reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses can give a much needed boost to your photos. / © ANDROIDPIT

Panorama with multiple “identical” subjects

Back in April, the Google Camera app was released in the Google Play Store and anyone who was running Android 4.4 KitKat or higher could grab it for their Android device. In the Google Camera app, you can use the Panorama function to pan horizontally across a scene and capture an entire landscape. For this tip, you can have make a surreal effect by having the same model in multiple “shots” of the photo. To do this, you’ll need to make sure that you capture a portion of the panorama, hold the camera steady, and then either get your subject to move or move it yourself (if you’re capturing an object). A big part of making this work is making sure you hold the camera steady when the subject is being moved, so it may take a few tries to get it right.

Google CameraINSTALL

photos May 3 — Capturing the same object or subect twice in one panoramic photo. / © ANDROIDPIT

Augmented color reality

This is a fairly unknown and relatively new app available on the Google Play Store. With it, you can just pick and choose a garment or object and change the color of it to anything that you want. Just a point of advice when using this app, the more contrast in the photo, the better it works. As well, it will replace the color on all objects in the photo with the same “palette” as can be seen in our example photo below with the change of color in the shoes and also the denim.

Colorify Augmented RealityINSTALL

augmented camera tricks — Changing the color of an object, with a little help from an app. / © ANDROIDPIT

Underwater shots

Now this one is for those who are either a little brave with experimenting with their devices or for those of you who already have a waterproof phone, such as the Sony Xperia Z2. For this, always make sure you’re extremely careful with your smartphone around water! Depending and what you’re looking for, you can use a large glass, place your smartphone in it, and then submerge it so a portion or it is underwater to gather a split image above and below the water. You can also use a freezer bag for a quick and dirty solution that can go under water for a few seconds or if you’re using an abnormally larger device to capture photos, such as the Galaxy Note 3. Finally, you can also opt for a waterproof case for your device and go that route!

photos 4 — As stated above, always be careful with your device around water. / © ANDROIDPIT

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Tiny Planet

This is probably one of the cooler photo editing tricks you can do by combining your panoramic photos into a globe effect that has been dubbed “Tiny Planets”. We’ve got two apps that you can use to accomplish this effect. The first one, Tiny Planet FX, isn’t free but has some spectacular options to customize the effect. The second app, Globe Photo, is free and does require a little fiddling around in order to get used to it.