Phone camera settings on the water

There are about four settings on a phone that matter on a boat, and the rest is light. Which is inconvenient, because settings are adjustable and light is not, so almost everybody spends their attention on the wrong half. The federal sun-safety guidance contains the most useful photographic instruction anybody has ever written for this trade, and it was written about skin rather than pictures: if your shadow is taller than you are, exposure is lower, and if it is shorter than you are, it is higher. That is a light meter you already carry, it works from the deck, and it tells you what kind of picture is available before you lift the phone. Where the resulting images go is set out under the getting-booked hub.

What does the shadow tell you?

Roughly how harsh the light is, without any equipment.

The sun-safety guidance sets out the rule plainly: if your shadow is taller than you are, which happens in the early morning and late afternoon, exposure is likely to be lower, and if your shadow is shorter than you are, around midday, exposure is higher.

It is written as a health instruction and it doubles as a photographic one, because the same low angle that reduces exposure also produces the light people call good.

Shadow taller than you means side light, long shadows, texture on water and faces that are not squinting.

Shadow shorter than you means overhead light, hat brims across eyes, blown highlights on wet surfaces and the flattest pictures of the day.

The guidance also grades the risk itself, describing an index of one to two as low, three to seven as moderate to high with protection needed, and eight or above as very high to extreme.

Read from the deck, that scale tells you as much about the pictures as about the sunscreen.

The scale is published by the Environmental Protection Agency, which notes that it conforms with international reporting guidelines.

Althea K Sport, MA

Can you know the light before you leave?

There is a published forecast, city by city.

The forecast for that index is issued daily as a bulletin and a map covering fifty-eight cities, generated around half past one in the afternoon Eastern time.

The forecast was substantially revised in November 2023, when the climatological aerosol inputs were replaced with model forecasts and the temporal and spatial resolution of the inputs and outputs was increased.

None of which makes it a photographic tool, and all of which makes it a better proxy than a glance out of the window at five in the morning.

A high reading tells you the middle of the day will be unusable for anything except documentation, which is worth knowing before you plan the trip's photographs.

A low reading means the whole day is workable and the good light lasts longer at both ends.

Combine that with the shadow rule and you have a plan for when to take pictures rather than a hope.

The forecast is published by the Climate Prediction Center.

Which setting matters most?

Exposure lock, and almost nobody uses it.

Water is the reason. A phone metering a scene with a large bright surface in it will darken everything else to protect that surface, which is why so many boat photographs have a correctly exposed sea and a silhouetted client.

Every phone has a way to lock exposure on a chosen point, usually a long press, and learning it takes one afternoon.

Lock on the face, accept that the water goes bright, and you will have a picture of a person rather than a picture of the Gulf.

The reverse also holds: where the water is the subject, lock on the water and let the boat go dark deliberately.

What ruins pictures is letting the phone decide, because it will choose differently between two frames taken four seconds apart.

Practise it on the way out rather than at the moment somebody is holding a fish.

How the resulting shots get used is covered in the trip photos piece.

Ken Milam, TX

Which capture format should you use?

Decide it deliberately, and know what you chose.

Modern phones default to a container format that is an international standard, first published in 2017, designed to hold photographic images in any encoding.

The Library of Congress format description is precise about what it depends on: the container standard for its file structure and a video compression standard for its encoding, both maintained through international standards bodies.

It records the adoption history too, noting the format's introduction for capture on phones in 2017, chip-level support arriving in 2018 and 2020, another manufacturer adding capture support in 2019, and camera makers offering it internally from 2020.

Its assessment of transparency is the sentence a guide should read twice: the format depends upon complex algorithms and tools to read, and will require sophistication to build tools.

Which is a preservation body's way of saying that a file in this format is not a file everybody can open.

Against that, it credits the format with excellent capabilities for incorporating metadata, covering the primary image, collections, derived images, auxiliary images and thumbnails, and commonly including the standard camera metadata.

The practical answer for most guides is to capture in the widely compatible format and stop thinking about it, unless you have a reason not to.

The format description is published by the Library of Congress.

Why does compatibility matter more than quality?

Because the picture is going to a stranger's device.

Everything a guide shoots is eventually sent to somebody: a client, a lodge, a magazine, a booking platform.

A file that opens everywhere is worth more than a marginally better file that opens on some things, and the difference in quality is invisible at the sizes anybody actually views.

The metadata point matters here too, because the format standards define how camera information, rights information and descriptive information travel inside the file.

That is useful when it survives and confusing when it does not, which is another argument for the format everything reads.

Where you genuinely need the higher-efficiency format, convert on export rather than capturing in it and hoping.

And check what your own phone is set to, since the default has changed more than once and nobody was told.

How to process what comes off the phone is covered in the fast editing piece.

What about the grid and the horizon?

Turn it on, and use it for one thing.

The grid overlay exists for composition and its genuine value on a boat is simpler: it shows you when the horizon is level.

A tilted horizon is the single most common defect in guide photography, and it is the one thing a viewer notices without being able to say why.

It happens because the deck is not level and your inner ear believes the deck.

With the grid on you can see the error before pressing rather than discovering it in the edit, where correcting it costs you the edges of the frame.

The other thing the grid is good for is remembering that the horizon should almost never sit exactly across the middle.

Neither of those requires knowing anything about composition, which is why it is the first setting to change.

The video equivalent of this problem is covered in the boat video piece.

Which lens should you use?

The wide one, unless there is a reason.

Phones with several lenses tempt everybody into the long one, which magnifies every movement of a boat and produces the shakiest frames of the day.

The wide lens forgives motion, keeps more of the water in frame, and is the one the phone is best at.

Its cost is that it puts the subject further away in the frame, which means getting closer rather than zooming.

On a boat that is usually possible, and the resulting picture is better for it.

The exception is a shot of something genuinely distant, where the long lens is the only option and the frame will be soft.

Do not use the digital zoom beyond the optical range, since that is cropping presented as magnification.

Deciding what is worth photographing at all is covered in the video ideas piece, which applies the same discipline.

What should stay switched off?

Anything that cannot be undone.

Filters applied at capture are baked in, and no amount of later work recovers what they removed.

The same applies to any aggressive enhancement mode that decides how a sky should look, since a boat sky and a landscape sky are different problems.

Leave those off, capture something ordinary and true, and make the decisions later where they can be reversed.

The exception is any stabilisation feature, which should be on and which genuinely helps on water.

Live or motion photo modes are a matter of taste and storage rather than quality, and they occasionally save a shot where somebody blinked.

What matters is that you know what is on, since a phone that updated itself last week may have enabled something you did not choose.

Check the settings once at the start of a season and then leave them alone.

How do you protect the phone?

Assume it goes in, because eventually one does.

Water resistance ratings assume fresh water and an undamaged seal, and a boat provides neither salt-free conditions nor an undamaged anything after a season.

The practical protections are a case, a lanyard or a floating pouch, and rinsing the phone in fresh water at the end of a saltwater day.

Heat is the less obvious problem: a phone in direct sun on a console will throttle, stop recording video, and eventually refuse to open the camera at all.

Keep it out of the sun between shots, which is a habit rather than a purchase.

Carry a battery pack, because the phone is also your weather, your navigation and your way of calling somebody.

And back the pictures up before the next trip rather than at the end of the season.

Sending them to clients quickly is covered in the photo permission piece, which is the conversation that should happen first.

How do you photograph a fish without ruining it?

Decide the shot before the fish is out of the water.

Every good fish photograph is the product of about eight seconds of preparation and about three seconds of fish, and reversing that ratio is how the pictures and the fish both suffer.

Have the phone unlocked, the camera open, the exposure locked on the client's face and the boat turned before anything is lifted.

Tell the client what you are going to do in one sentence, so they are not asking questions while holding something heavy and wet.

Take three frames rather than fifteen, because the fifteenth is no better and the fish has been out for a minute.

Shoot slightly down rather than up, which shows the water behind the fish and reads as a scene rather than a trophy pose.

And where a fish should not come out at all, photograph it in the water, which is a better picture than most people expect.

Clients who fish elsewhere notice which operations work this way, and they mention it.

What about photographing people who are not fishing?

Those are the pictures that actually sell trips.

A grip-and-grin says a fish was caught. A picture of somebody laughing on a run at first light says what a day with you is like, which is what a stranger is trying to work out.

Those frames are also the easiest to get, because nobody is holding anything and nobody is waiting.

Shoot the run out, the rigging, the coffee, the moment somebody first sees the water: all of it is available with no cost to the fishing at all.

Keep the client small in the frame where the water is the point, and close where the expression is.

Ask nobody to pose, since the visible difference between a posed shot and a candid one is what makes the second one work.

An operation with a season of those has a website. An operation with a season of grip-and-grins has a gallery that looks like everybody else's.

Which of them belongs on a booking page is discussed in the profile photos piece.

Should you shoot in bursts?

Rarely, and never as a substitute for timing.

A burst produces forty near-identical frames, of which one is marginally better and none is chosen, because nobody sits down to compare forty pictures of the same second.

The exception is a genuinely unrepeatable moment with movement in it: a jump, a release, a wave over the bow.

Everywhere else, three deliberate frames beat forty automatic ones, and they leave you with an evening rather than a weekend of sorting.

The deeper cost is that a burst teaches you not to watch, and watching is the entire skill.

A guide who sees the moment coming takes one frame and has it, which is a habit that develops only if the burst is unavailable.

Where you do use one, cull it the same day, keeping one frame and deleting the rest without sentiment.

The same-day cull is the difference between an archive and a backlog.

What survives that cull is what clients end up sharing, as covered in the Instagram piece.

Which habits ruin phone pictures?

Seven, and the first is shooting into the sun.

Photographing a client with the sun behind them, which turns a person into a shape.

Letting automatic metering choose between the water and the face.

Shooting at midday because that is when the fish came, without acknowledging what the light is doing.

Using the long lens on a moving boat.

Applying a filter at capture that cannot be removed.

Capturing in a format the recipient cannot open.

And leaving the horizon crooked because the deck felt level.

What to do with the good ones is covered in the testimonials piece.

What surprises operators here?

That a health rule is the best light meter available.

The shadow test was written to prevent sunburn and it describes the day's light more usefully than any photographic guidance a guide is likely to read.

The second surprise is that the exposure index is forecast daily for dozens of cities and published free, which almost nobody in this trade checks.

The third is that the modern capture format is described by a preservation body as depending on complex algorithms and requiring sophistication to build tools for.

The fourth is how much of the outcome is decided before the phone comes out, by where the boat is pointing.

The fifth is that the single most valuable setting is a long press most people have never tried.

Taken together, the phone is not the limitation and never was.

What to publish afterwards is planned in the content calendar piece.

The settings, in order

Format, grid, exposure, lens.

Check which capture format your phone is using and choose the compatible one unless you have a specific reason.

Turn the grid on and use it to keep the horizon level on a deck that is not.

Learn the exposure lock, practise it on the way out, and lock on the face rather than the water.

Stay on the wide lens and move closer instead of zooming.

Switch off anything applied at capture that cannot be undone, and leave stabilisation on.

Check the forecast index the night before, and use the shadow rule on the water.

Turn the boat rather than fighting the light, and do it before the fish is in the net.

Then back everything up before the next trip, because the season's best picture is always on the phone that goes overboard.