Thanks to smartphones, recording video has never been so easy and convenient. Here are 10 tips to help you. Camera On Cell phone Omegle is also a popular read as well. There are cases, however, in which a good smartphone can save you and, following the right advice, it can even give you better results .

For example, we can’t afford to always carry a heavy camera with us while we always have our cell phone close at hand. Furthermore, the cameras integrated in smartphones are always better, more and more precise and in some cases, superior to some mid-range mirrorless cameras.

Recording video has never been so easy and convenient. Everyone has a powerful video camera in their pocket: a smartphone . In fact, smartphones have become more important as mobile creativity tools, to the point where some see it as the primary purpose, and as important as communication.

With a little practice and access to some important tips, even you – yes, you – can start recording great material, vlogging, or even shooting an indie film or documentary using just your smartphone.

In an effort to help you capture what you want in the best possible way, Pocket-lint has therefore collected ten tips. Although some of the tips may seem obvious, if you follow them all, you should get a great video every time.

Tips for recording better video with your smartphone

1. Landscape

Nothing ruins good footage like having two black vertical bars running down both sides of your video. To avoid this amateur error, make sure to use landscape mode and not portrait mode when recording.

Landscape not only makes your video appear more aesthetically pleasing in general, but it also makes it more enjoyable to watch when viewed on a television, screen, tablet, or phone held in landscape. Plus, you capture more in the video itself.

So remember: Unless you’re filming specifically for vertically oriented services like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Stories, never hold your phone vertically when recording.

2. Setting

Now that you’re shooting in the right direction (see above), fill the frame with your subject. You can also place them or it slightly off-center to create a more visually interesting scene. Just play around and see what looks best.

Most phone camera apps have the ability to enable grid lines if you go into the camera settings, where you have vertical and horizontal grids on the screen while you’re shooting. The most popular framing tool is the “rule of thirds”, so if you enable a 3×3 grid in your camera app, you can line up your subject with one of the vertical “thirds” lines or use the horizontal lines to get the horizon in the desired position.

If you are going to edit the video afterwards, it is also a good principle to photograph the subject from several focal lengths and angles. Play with wide shots, portrait shots and close-ups. Close-ups are good for establishing the scene and positioning the subject, while close-ups are good for conveying emotion or showing finer details.

3. Zoom in

Nothing is worse than digital zoom – ask any professional photographer. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where many of the best smartphones have a lossless or “optical” zoom, which allows you to zoom in without losing much (if any) detail.

To be able to zoom in while recording without losing the sharp, vivid quality you want in videos, you need a device that has a decent optical zoom – for example, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra . If you have a smartphone with more than one camera on the back, often one of the extra lenses is a designated “telephoto lens”.

If you don’t have a smartphone with optical zoom, you need to get closer to the subject or use an accessory such as the clip-on lenses from Moment. In general, you should always get as close as possible, especially for tight shots of faces. Let’s see freckles, fine lines and freckles on the cheeks.

4. Flash

We’ve all seen those videos where the subject has yellow skin and red devilish eyes paired with super dark backgrounds. The guilty one? Well, yes, it’s the photographer … but it’s also the flash.

Smartphones are equipped with LED lights that are too bright and can easily distort the color temperature in the images. Also, the video is often still poorly lit in the end. If you want to record a photo at night, you need to find another light source. Or if your phone has a night mode for photography, you can use that too. When it comes to video, however, there aren’t many phones that shoot well in low light.

If you want or need extra lighting, thankfully you can get it relatively cheap. Search Amazon for affordable ring lights if you want an evenly lit face for filming vlogs for the camera, or buy some small battery-powered LED panels. They will give you a much more consistent and smooth look than the LED flash on your phone could ever do.

Background lighting

There’s another thing to keep in mind when thinking about flashes and lighting in general: avoid heavily backlit settings.

You might be able to see people and their faces when they’re backlit, but your smartphone camera usually can’t see them and will produce images with a bright light haloing a dark figure. That figure will also have no visible features, meaning you just missed whatever it was you were trying to capture. If your phone doesn’t have any really advanced HDR capabilities, this is something you definitely need to keep an eye on.

To avoid this situation, try configuring a basic lighting setup. Those of you shooting on the fly can also improve a backlit situation by moving to one side or the other, or moving your subject so it’s facing the light. Although some standard camera apps try to reduce the effects of backlight, you should also try to reduce the effects on your own.

6. Time-lapse

Time-lapse or time-lapse photography is a film technique in which the frequency at which the film images are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that used to display the sequence. When you play the sequence at normal speed, time seems to move faster and thus pass.

Simply put: time-lapse photography is time manipulation. Objects and events that would normally take hours, days, months or years can be captured and then viewed later at a much faster rate, thanks to the technology of time-lapse photography.

Before the Instagram team debuted Hyperlapse, creating a time-lapse video with your smartphone was both boring and, to be honest, difficult. Since then, most manufacturers have just built the feature directly into the pre-installed camera app. Apple iPhones, for example, have a time-lapse function in the camera.

Some phones still don’t have it, and Hyperlapse has since been discontinued, but there are alternatives. Microsoft has its own Hyperlapse app on the Play Store that’s easy to use and stabilizes your shots, and there’s another app called Framelapse Pro that gets pretty good ratings.

7. Stabilizing and even material

One advancement that has come from the smartphone industry in recent years is electronic and optical image stabilization. Essentially, it reduces handshake to a minimum if you are filming the handshake. It works relatively well, but if you’re moving to follow a subject or using it to pan or orbit a person or object, the best way to do that is to get a physical gimbal that works with your phone really smooth.

One such gimbal is the DJI OM 4. With your phone connected and the app loaded, you can take advantage of the phone’s video capabilities, but the stabilization offered by the gimbal gives you a clean, cinematic look that you’d struggle to achieve when shooting handheld. It doesn’t matter how steady your grip is.

9) Effects

Snapchat was one of the first apps to completely change the way we shoot video. With it, you can quickly send a video (or snap) of yourself at work to a friend, who can then open it, take a screenshot of it if they want, and reply back with a video reply of their own.

You can make the snaps even more fun by adding augmented reality-based special effects and sounds, with a feature called Lenses. Just like Lenses, which are primarily applied to your face in real time, there are also 3D World Lenses that uniquely affect the surrounding environment.

This animation is superimposed on the world around us and can be captured and then shared with our friends in a chat or followers via our story. Both lenses and world lenses are frequently changed by Snapchat, although popular lenses are recurring. Finally, there are filters, which you can use to spice up your snap.

You can add color filters, current time, local weather, speed overlays or geofilters to your video. When you’re done playing with any of these Snapchat features, you can always save your snap locally on your device and then share it with others via other social networks or SMS. But if Snapchat isn’t your thing, try Instagram . Instagram offers several filters and lenses for videos as well.

10) Accessories

Let’s be honest: smartphone cameras just aren’t as good as the powerhouses made by Canon, Panasonic or Sony, mainly because smartphone cameras and their standard camera apps lack finer controls and stuff, even though they’re getting a lot better .

Therefore, if you want to take your smartphone video recording skills to the next level, without having to buy an expensive DSLR , you might want to consider buying accessories that reveal your camera’s true potential. You can get everything from tripod mounting systems to creative add-on lenses.

Editing

Finally, sometimes it takes a little editing to take your photos from “meh” to “wow.” And nowadays you can do some intensive editing on your smartphone too, meaning you don’t need to invest in fancy computer software.

Everything from basic trimming to adding transitions, titles and effects is easy on both iOS and Android mobile devices. Whether your next video is a montage or a school project, mobile apps can streamline the video editing process.

Apple’s own iMovie for iPhone and iPad, for example, includes titles and transitions and even supports the creation of theatrical trailers on the fly. Other features include picture-in-picture, split screen and slow motion effects. It’s actually very similar to iMovie on Mac. For the iPad Pro, you might want to try LumaFusion or Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve, although they are quite expensive if you want a full set of features.

Pinnacle Studio is another good example, as are Videon and Magisto. But that’s not all: Adobe’s Premiere Rush app is a powerful video editing program with many of the features of Premiere Pro, albeit stripped down and usable by anyone.

It offers fast video editing, much like other mobile apps, where you can just drag and drop footage and photos in the order you want and trim them, but it’s also compatible with Premiere Pro so you can export the final result to the desktop program and refine it with greater Control.