CD Light Reflection

Have you ever wondered how the most professional photographers get their lighting just right? A few days ago I picked up a CD, made it face the sun, and took a picture of myself and I got the perfect rainbow effect reflected on my face. If it doesn't work on you, then try an object like a book, a hand, or even a wall.

Cardboard/Foam as your background

Nearly all professional photographs have a hard or rough background and have some sort of cool texture to it. Surprisingly enough, cardboard does too. You can cut off a piece of cardboard off of something (or if you have cardboard lying around, you can use that too) and tape it to a wall and angle it to match your object.

The reason I use objects instead of people is that cardboard is not big enough for people and also because, in the photograph, objects will result in a better picture. You can even paint it if you wanted to.

Mess around with your lens.

There is so much you can do with the lens of a camera and a phone. You can make a drawing and use that as a silhouette in the light if you don't have a camera, but if you do, you can tape those little drawings onto the lens. You can also put tape on the lens to get a blurry effect or even get an empty tissue roll to get a "tunnel" effect.

Make exposure, contrast and tint your best friends.

You don't have to use these at all but they are very helpful and the results are amazing. Exposure is helpful to change the lighting of something, and brightness works too however exposure keeps the same exact picture intact instead of just "making it darker." Contrast and tint go well together especially when you are taking sunset pictures.

You can change the contrast so that there is more focus on the topic of the photograph and tint gives the picture a nice pink/purple type of light.

If you are trying to take an action shot, take a video and then screenshot it.

Photographers are very creative; therefore, taking a video of someone jumping, for example, is much easier than having that person jump a hundred times and never getting the perfect shot.

After that, fix your clarity and vibrancy, make sure to crop it perfectly, and you're good to go!

When taking a "top-down" type of picture, tape your phone to the ceiling.

If you are not familiar with a top down picture, it's when you take a picture from the top and the camera looks very high up in the result.

You can take a piece of duck tape and just tape your phone to the ceiling and hit the timer. If you aren't comfortable with taping your entire phone to the ceiling, you can take something that holds your phone and tape that object to the ceiling.

Use a pair of glasses

This one can't be simple enough. Just take any type of glasses and put them in front of your phone or camera lens and then take the picture through the glasses making sure to not show the viewers that they are glasses and take a picture only with the lenses of the glasses.

Use blur to get rid of something you don't want.

You can use blur to edit out small things, preferably something that is on your face, like a bug bite. Don't blur too much because since this is freestyle blurring you do not want to mess up a good picture.

Angles are more important than you think.

Put your phone on the ground or your lens and hit a timer or put the phone upside down to take certain pictures. Fiddle with a bunch of different angles to tell a story or get a good picture out of it.

If you are taking a picture of someone and they are holding a flower, try to make the flower the focus instead, not them and the results will turn out nicely.

Lastly, don't be afraid to edit!

If you like to have natural pictures without adding any special effects, that is completely fine.

However, I love to take a boring picture and change the lighting, add some tint, put some vignette here and there or some double exposure to make the picture pop out. Natural pictures have a nice look to them, but if you like editing, go for it!

The tools on some photography softwares are very useful and once you find the perfect balance of everything, your pictures will turn out to look awesome!