How To Capture Natural Looking Portraits With Smartphones

Capturing natural-looking photos of friends with a smartphone can be hard work, especially with ones who like nothing better than posing for a selfie, so our friends COOPH have put a quick video tutorial together that's packed with tips and tricks to help you out. 

In the tutorial, you'll find 8 tips that'll ensure you can capture natural-looking photos of your friends, without putting them on the spot.

The COOPH team use the Huawei P20 smartphone but you can use any smartphone really. However, one that has an in-depth camera effect built in will mean you can follow the tutorial more closely.  

Here are the 8 tips featured in the tutorial: 

1. Focus on hand gestures to convey emotion 
2. Shoot side profiles
3. Get them to look over their shoulder at you
4. Play around with your location and use what's around you
5. Experiment with light 
6. Anticipate an action and use it to your advantage 
7. Compose and wait for 'a moment'
8. Shoot from behind

Why not try the tips out for yourself and share your results with us in our gallery? You can get some inspiration from the images captured by the COOPH team below.

We also have loads of other top tutorials from these guys which are well worth checking out which include topics such as low light smartphone photography and high-speed smartphone photography. 

All photos © COOPH.