- Hey, everyone!
Today we're gonna teach you how
to get crystal clear and perfectly sharp photos
every time you shoot with your phone.
I'm Leigh Loftus of We Are Loftus
and I'm here to teach you all about using your cell phone
in shooting your food in restaurants and hotels.
If you're into that, subscribe over here,
click the bell, and follow every Tuesday for our new videos.
(bright, upbeat music)
Have you ever noticed
that your photos might be way too bright,
way too dark, or simply out of focus?
By the end of this video, you're gonna know
why that happens, how to change it,
and get the perfect shot every time.
We teach this every single time we train our clients
and our friends on what to do.
It blows their mind and now it's time to teach you.
So whenever you pick up your phone to take a picture,
you're gonna have a little yellow box
that shows up on the screen.
That's your focal point.
And our phones are always trying
to solve for exactly what it is that you're trying to shoot.
And most of the time they're pretty smart.
And you know they get great photos.
But likely often you've ran into photos
that aren't exactly what you want them to be.
So you can actually take your finger
and set your focus where you want it to be.
So you can tap your phone.
So if your dish is right there,
tap the yellow box to be exactly
where your dish is and where you want the focus to be.
So once you've set your focus,
you can actually press and hold that box
until you see at the top of the screen
where it says AE/AF lock.
And that stands for auto-focus/auto-exposure.
And when you press and hold it,
it's gonna actually lock in place.
From there, you can notice if
either your background is too bright
or your dish is too bright or anything's too dark,
you can take your finger where
that little sunlight is and slide it up
or down to change your exposure.
And whenever you're done setting it,
it will stay locked in place.
(imitates explosion) Mind freaking blown!
That will solve all of your problems
in the pictures being too bright or too dark.
You can see the screen's a little bright.
This bread is definitely blown out.
So I'm gonna press and hold,
and see up here, it says AE/AF lock.
Now I can slide my finger up or down to control the light.
And wherever I lock that square,
that's where the focal point will stay until I tap it again.
I can move it to any other location.
Let's say I wanted to focus on that clock.
Not a great shot, but I'm showing it for the demo.
Press and hold.
AE/AF lock and then that's a little bright.
So you'd drag it down till the exposure's great.
So now I'm gonna talk to you a little about HDR.
Typically people equate that to architecture photography
and not necessarily food photography.
We're gonna walk you through in just a second
how to go into your settings and turn that on.
But if you've ever noticed whenever you're still,
you're changing your exposure like we just talked about,
but there's still way too blown-out whites,
if you turn on your HDR setting
and you take that exact same photograph,
then the HDR is gonna compensate.
What it does is it takes three photos
and composites them together to make the best exposure,
which brings in those details from your white plates
that usually get too blown out
by not having the HDR turned on.
In our camera app, up here you see my HDR button.
By default, that's normally not turned on.
So I'm gonna have you open your settings,
go into your camera again, camera,
and see at the very bottom where it says Auto HDR.
Yours is probably turned on.
I actually want you to turn that off.
And that allows you to decide when you want
to use the HDR setting or not.
Otherwise, it's running all of the time
in the background and that's not ideal
because you don't want every single photo to be HDR.
It's gonna take up way more space on your phone,
which obviously we don't want that.
And again, you want to be dictating whenever you use it.
If the plates are too bright, if something,
sometimes if you have HDR on for food,
it's gonna be way too dramatic
and add way too much color and contrast.
So you're in charge of your photos
and you make the decisions on how you shoot them.
I'm gonna actually use my second lens and back up
so that we can address the bowing
that we talked about earlier.
I'm gonna set my focus here and right now,
you can see the rim of the bowl is way too bright.
So you actually want to tend
to shoot a little bit dark because just like
whenever you guys are teaching your young chefs,
if you have too much salt, you can't remove it.
Here if you don't have detail, you can't add it.
So I do still have a little bit
of blown out here on the left-hand side.
I'm gonna go ahead and it leave it
'cause I think it's still a very strong shot
and there's enough detail around.
I think that's a great one.
I'm gonna come a little bit closer,
reset my focus, and this could also be a good time
to play around with HDR.
So HDR, you use it whenever things are too bright
and too dark.
And what happens is the camera actually takes three photos
and merges them together behind the scenes for you
so that you can see a composite
of the lightness and darkness.
And since we're struggling with the let's say bottom side
of this image being too bright,
I'm gonna go ahead and turn on the HDR,
set my exposure and focus, bring it down a little bit
because it's too bright, and
snap.
And then let's go look at the HDR one.
It did exactly what it's supposed to do.
It got that plate to not be overblown,
which is a huge issue that you guys could face
when you're using natural light.
So that helps you solve it.
We're gonna go through that again and again and again
so you get used to changing your settings.
Now you know how to set the perfect exposure
and the perfect focus every time you take a photo.
But knowing is not the same as doing.
Just like if you were to learn
how to make the perfect sauce.
You're not gonna just know how to make the perfect sauce.
You're gonna go practice making the perfect sauce.
So I have a bonus assignment for you.
Type bonus below if you're interested in participating.
We created a Facebook page specifically for you guys.
I'm in charge of it.
So we want you to take these photos,
go there, use our hashtags, ask me for advice,
ask for me feedback, I'm gonna give you that,
and then also the more of you that join,
the more comments and critiques you can give one another
and make your photos even better.
Thank you so much for watching this video!
Like it below to let us know you like it.
Comment helpful if this was helpful to you.
And feel free to send to your friends, other followers.
We really want to help everybody start taking better photos
with their phone because it's the tool that we have.
(bright, upbeat music)