[attach id=246698 size="medium"]Photo: Jamie Iain Genovese[/attach]

Phoneography is a pervasive modern phenomenon among 20-somethings and 20-somethings-to-be and not infrequent among older adults either, so it might behove you to know how to take good pictures with your smartphone. But before we get to the actual process, it might help to see why people are into it and why it might be a little bit controversial.

Phoneography takes two things that people love – social media and visual self-expression – and rolls them into one neat little package. It’s all the fun of being creative with none of the unemployment. Moreover, the process is immediate enough to be done outdoors, in the company of friends, while paragliding, or right before dinner.

Of course, not all photos that have flooded sites and apps such as Instagram have strong artistic merit. Plenty are the blurred night shots, uninspiring sunsets, uneaten meals and people’s cats.

There are many strong exceptions to be found, such as Damon Winters, who won an award for his Hipstamatic photos of the conflict in Afghanistan.

There are also dedicated websites such as www.phoneographyblog.com and www.welovephoneography.com. And so, if you’re still reading at this point, I assume you’re starting to see the merit in phoneography and might actually be interested in giving it a shot. Lucky for you, it’s simple.

Apart from composure, a crucial element is exposure. Try taking two pictures of the same thing – in the first picture tap on something light (or overexposed) before you take a picture, and in the second take a picture of something dark (or underexposed). See the difference? Good. Now you can play Ansel Adams with lonely trees.

Exposure depends on the light being sampled by your smartphone’s processor. Low light decreases the shutter speed, which increases the risk of blurring (using the inbuilt flash or a tripod is your best chance of fighting this), while ample light increases the shutter speed, reducing blur.

Keep this in mind when you’re shooting. Photography is all about light, so night or day and indoor or outdoor make all the difference.

One of the first choices you have to make is choosing between a standard 4:3 crop or a square format (1:1) crop, an aspect ratio that was common when Polaroid cameras, such as the ever-popular SX-70 Sonar, were popular. Apps such as Instagram have made square format photos vastly more popular than the standard 4:3 – as such it seems to be the format of choice for many, especially since Facebook bought the app.

There’s a novel appeal to square images in the modern world – they are peculiar and uncommon enough to be instantly recognisable and novel enough to be popular. It may be a gimmick, but it’s a popular one.

If you’re leaning towards the cameraphone’s default 4:3 aspect ratio, the only apps you’ll ever really need are Camera+, Snapseed and maybe Cinemagram, which allows you to make a photo that is both part-photo and part-movie. All the standard rules of photography apply here. Make the focal point, or the subject, of an image a third of the way into the composition (left or right) or dead centre. If there is a horizon, you want it to be perfectly straight (this can be done using the grid function on your phone) – if it’s not straight, it had better be near a 45-degree angle, slight degrees of tilt are known to make the most liberal of artists cringe. Most of the camera apps that adhere to the 4:3 aspect ratio aren’t filter heavy and mostly let you go monochrome, change the contrast and use some quick fixes to enhance the photo.

If you’re toying with square-format phoneography, Instagram and Diptic are your best apps to use in tandem. Diptic lets you select a layout for single or multiple photos, add borders, edit the contrast, saturation, hue and brightness, add filters and upload it straight to Instagram.

Here, you can add further final touches, add a caption and then share that photo on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and via e-mail too. If you decide to just use Instagram, you can layer filters by uploading an edited photo and adding another filter over it.

Of course, you can always forego all the fancy extras and simply upload a photo in its naked-yet-square form, but not without tagging it as #nofilter, so all the other filter-avoiding snobs can find, like and comment on your naturally beautiful square photo.