How to Shoot a Cover Photo on Your Phone at Home

Not everyone can pay for studio time, and for most covers you do not need to. This is the routine we give artists who are shooting at home with a phone.

The steps

1. Open your camera settings and switch to the highest quality shooting format available.
2. Clean the lens. Dust and fingerprints are what make phone photos look soft and hazy.
3. Hand the phone to someone else and show them a reference of the angle you want.
4. Use natural light. Outdoors on an overcast day, or indoors in a bright room facing a window. Avoid hard light and heavy shadows.
5. Set the exposure by hand: tap the brightest part of the screen, then drag the slider until the frame is neither blown out nor muddy.
6. Shoot the pose your idea calls for — you should already know what that is before you pick up the phone.
7. Take several frames of everything. Choosing the best of twenty is easy; rescuing the only one you took is not.

Why it matters

A clean source photo does not just save the designer time. It decides how close the finished cover can get to what you imagined — every flaw in the original either has to be worked around or shows up in the result.