Preparing for photography contest with your smartphone.

𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙊𝙣𝙚

1) always study your equipment (here your smartphone) and go through it’s camera settings in depth.

2) Understand each and every small feature. always enable Grid Lines for better composition.

3) Always keep your lens clean.

4) Always keep the image quality High, file size large.

5) Use 3:4 ratio instead of square, full screen , 1×1, 16:9 ratio because keeping 3:4 ratio will be very helpful for sending Image’s for mobile phone photography competition as well as other contests where 3:2 ratio image’s are asked. Here you can slightly crop from 3:4 (4:3) ratio to 2:3 ratio so that you can print in 8×12, 10×15, 12×18 inches print size. (Please note that good quality print depends upon your lens, sensor, exposure). For India press photo awards my awarded image was printed in 30inches in length, which was clicked on Asus Zenfone3.

6) Never use inbuilt phone filters while clicking the image’s as it may mar the quality of the image, instead use the image editing app like Google Snapseed, Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc for minor edits. Personally I prefer Google Snapseed to edit my Image’s. Even while editing I keep it simple. Brightness, Contrast,Hue saturation, sharpness etc are fine.

7) Some edit original and delete original file. Always keep a separate edited copy and original RAW, Unedited files separately because if you are winner in any competition and organisers/jury members ask you for a RAW or Unedited file then you must able to produce it failing submitting the same will unqualified from the contest or award.

8) Never ever enable the date, your signature or product name, because such images with visible data are not accepted in any photography competition so strictly avoid them and disable all that functions.

9) Now every mobile company comes out with higher megapixel feature (for example some to 48 megapixel some 64 some, 100 etc, but when you opt for that option it is not truly a 64,100 MP file but system combines 4 image’s to give result of that particular equivalent MP, it is called as a Pixel Binning.

Shooting on higher MP also eat your internal space, external card storage memory too.

10) It is always better to understand your equipments Pros and Cons for example never try to Zoom because it is not an optical zoom you are using but a digital zone which can affect your quality very badly if we are using medium price smartphone like most of the of we use.

𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙏𝙬𝙤

now the second part of the article for preparing your image’s for final submission.

1) Always go through the Rules and Regulations at least 2,3 times till you understand them.

2) Understand the contest Theme well.

3) Check the file size, image resolution, colour mode, format and other details before submitting your work. For online uploading through organisers website, system won’t accept the image beyond the given size (for example if they ask for 2 MB file size to be uploaded on the contest page and your image is 2.5 MB then the system will automatically reject it, so always resize them as per rules. Also check the colour mode which organisers are asked for example RGB, sRGB etc. File Size,Format etc must send/upload as per guidelines.

4) Never put any Border, Frame to your image’s (unless it’s asked).

I hope this small at valuable tips will be helpful for you while sending the images for photo contest. Best Wishes.

Long live Photography