Your life and memories deserve to be amazing! This series focuses on the 10 biggest mistakes that kill your summer family photos and how you can fix them.

MISTAKE #1 - Using Only Your Smartphone Camera

Smartphones are indeed cool and convenient, but they have a ways to come yet. Your family summer vacations are outside the normal routine and take you on many new adventures...meaning countless complex lighting situations phone cameras cannot deal with. Have you ever tried to use your phone to make a photo in lava tube, attempted to capture the beautiful sunset at the beach resort, or got a blurry group shot around luau table after dark? Then you know what I 'm talking about and how your smartphone just couldn't keep up.

Taken on an iPhone in a little morning shade. Not very good.

iPhone trying to deal with low light in a tent.

SOLUTION: At the risk of stating the obvious, use your real camera instead

Like you, I have been lulled into the iDevice age. It takes considerable effort to remember the old digital-camera-thingy. Nearly all digital cameras are still better than nearly all smartphone cameras today, even the ones that boast 40 megapixels. We can certainly argue that phone technology is getting better...but so are high definition displays. How will your phone images look on that 4K screen you have been eyeing? Regardless which tech wins the race, I want to give my family memories the best possible chance which will never come from a built in camera smaller than a button. In twenty years it will be irrelevant which device we made images on...no one remembers nor cares. In that day, the quality of the memory will be determined by whether or not the image even is worth viewing.

By the way, I am not saying to stop using your smart phone camera altogether. When it's all you've got, its all you've got. Just stop always relying on your smartphone as the "go-to device" while vacationing and making memories together. You will regret it.

Read about the other mistakes...

-JMB

© 2015 Jared M. Burns Photography
Snohomish Family Photographer
www.jaredmburns.com | 206.659.7468 | info@jaredmburns.com