It is no surprise that Influencers have made us dream a lot with their wonderful and gorgeous lifestyles. But have you ever noticed how perfect their photos are? Even when they photograph the most simple and basic moment of their day, such as drinking a latte or just walking down a street, their pictures look always so stunning!
I have tried many filters from Instagram and other apps but have never achieved that same professional look.
How do they do it? Do we have to spend thousands of $$$ to achieve their most-wanted Instagram feed? Do we need to use those big DSLR cameras?
In a recent chat with luxury travel influencer Melanie Martins with over 2m followers on Instagram, we discussed how you and I could create professional pictures on a tight budget.
“There is no need to spend thousands of dollars on expensive cameras, your smartphone camera should be enough.” She mentioned.
“What would be the best advice you could give to get perfect shots from your smartphone?” – I asked.
Melanie gave us 3 simple bits of advice:
- Get good natural light directly on your face or the subject of your photo. If you are taking a portrait shot, getting slices shadows on your face will look quite bad. Either you are totally facing the light or you are totally in the shadow. Unless you want to do some specific artistic picture and play with shadows, this should be your number one rule for a portrait.
- Get an interesting angle or composition and avoid tourist-like shots. The one thing you don’t want to do is simply posing and smiling in front of a building as every tourist does. Get creative and try to get a “caught in the moment” shot where you will look much more natural and candid.
- Get presets instead of filters. Filters are cheaper for sure but they are very basic settings and you won’t achieve professional results with them. Presets, on the other hand, are powerful professionally created settings to achieve a specific look on your photos. Each preset has a purpose and can totally transform a picture from boring to stunning! Mobile presets can be imported and used on the Free Lightroom app available both for IOS and Android. Once imported on the app, you will be able to apply them directly in one single click on your photos and get instant professional results.
“The first 2 bits of advice are quite easy to follow. But where can we find those presets?” – I asked.
“Presets are created by photographers and professional post-editors. They are the ones who create them. The majority keep them for themselves as they don’t want to be copied.
As a photographer and post-editor myself, I also created my very own presets to use for my pictures and have cultivated my own style.
But following the advice of my community, I decided to release them online so everyone could use them and achieve professional results even on mobile pictures.” – she told me.
After my chat with Melanie, I could finally understand that presets where the make-or-break to achieve professional pictures no matter if they were taken with your phone or not.
I went to MelanieMartinsPresets.com, her online store to check her presets and I couldn’t believe how powerful and impressive was the transformation before/after the preset:
But the transformation was not only on Melanie’s pictures. Clients all over the world were sharing their before/after too:
All of them confirmed their pictures where taken with their mobile phone! I don’t know about you, but I know what I will be using to edit my next shots!
