Creative ways of using a phone camera (courtesy of my dad)

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It’s always a surprise when a parent teaches you something new on your phone. My dad casually dropped these juicy tips during lunch over the weekend and it had us all downing our drinks to put our phones inside our glasses.

1. Go under water

To take a picture under water, put your phone into an empty glass upside-down and lower into the water. Obviously, you only want to do this in calm water being careful not to lower it too far. Here’s an example:

2. Make a macro lens

You can only get so close to subjects with your phone camera, but you can create a macro lens by carefully placing a tiny drop of water on top of your camera lens. The shape of the drop of water creates another lens. This one is tricky as you have to turn your phone over again and take a photo of your very close subject without disturbing the drop of water. It works a treat! The example below is by nature photographer, Alex Wild (how’s that name!?)

The method:

And the result:

3. Change up the perspective

This one isn’t as much of a revelation, but it’s a good tip to be reminded of. It’s easy to stand where you are, hold your phone up at eye level and take a snap. Climbing on top of something and looking straight down onto a subject or getting down on your belly gives a whole new composition. Just look at those irrigation pipes!

These tips got me thinking and so I went in search of more fun ways of taking images. Turns out my dad was totally on trend. This video shows you how to do the following (some names embellished by yours truly):

1. The pano-dash
2. The pano-driveby
3. The bino-zoom
4. The macro lens trick
5. The reflector you never knew you had
6. The DIY tripod and shutter cable
7. The glass trick my dad told me about

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For the over-achievers of today’s class, here’s how to turn your phone into a DIY projector and how to make a 360 degree rotational time lapse with an egg timer (among other fun challenges): Check it out.