Chapter 22 — Exercises

This chapter's whole argument is that the phone is a real camera, so almost everything here is done with the camera that is already in your pocket — no purchase required, no excuse available. The point is to move you from accepting whatever the phone decides to driving it. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything you shoot — the strongest frame may become this chapter's Portfolio keeper.

Part A — Knowing the instrument (Settings Drill & Read the Frame)

Exercise 22.1 ⭐ — Find your phone's real lenses. Open your camera app and identify exactly which magnifications are optical (a true lens) versus digital crop. Most phones label them (e.g. 0.5×, 1×, 2×, 3×, 5×). Write the list. Then pinch slowly past the longest optical stop and watch the image quality fall apart — note the magnification where mushiness becomes obvious. You now know your phone's honest reach.

Exercise 22.2 ⭐ — Two controls, not three. In one or two sentences, explain why a typical phone drives the exposure triangle with only two of its three controls. Name which control is fixed, and what that means for how you must control exposure on a phone (which leg becomes your primary creative lever?).

Exercise 22.3 ⭐⭐ — Write the settings for five scenes. For each scenario, write what you'd set in pro/manual mode (ISO, shutter, focus approach, white balance, RAW or JPEG) and one sentence on the trade-off: (a) bright beach midday; (b) a portrait by a window indoors; (c) golden-hour landscape you want to keep warm; (d) a dim restaurant, handheld; (e) smoothed water from a phone braced on a rock. There isn't one right answer — defend your choices.

Exercise 22.4 ⭐⭐ — Read the phone frame. Re-read Figure 22.3 ("Backlit café table"). In your own words, name the four small-sensor limits the scene threatened, and the specific counter-move the photographer used against each. Then describe one thing you would have done differently and why.

Part B — Driving the phone (Shoot This)

Exercise 22.5 ⭐ — The exposure-lock fix. Find a backlit subject (a person or object against a bright window or sky). Frame it and watch the subject go dark. Now tap the subject to meter for it, nudge the exposure slider up, and — if your phone allows — lock AE/AF. Shoot both: the silhouette version and the corrected version. Keep the pair. The difference is one control you now own.

Exercise 22.6 ⭐⭐ — The manual-mode walk. Do the in-chapter §22.2 assignment formally. At a scene with a strong range of light, shoot the same composition four ways: (1) full Auto, JPEG; (2) manual, exposed for the highlights; (3) the same, exposure-locked on a shadow and recomposed; (4) RAW/ProRAW, exposed for the shadows. Shoot 12, keep 3, write one sentence each on what taking control changed.

Exercise 22.7 ⭐⭐ — RAW vs. JPEG, your own eyes. Shoot one high-contrast scene (bright sky, shadowed foreground) as both RAW and JPEG. In any editor, try to recover the blown sky and lift the dark shadow in each file. Write what you could pull back from the RAW that the JPEG had already thrown away. This is the chapter's bit-depth lesson, proven on your own image.

Exercise 22.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The exposure slider as a creative choice. Photograph one subject three ways using only the exposure slider: a "correct" metered exposure, a deliberately darker/moodier version (drag down), and a deliberately brighter/airier version (drag up). Same light, same frame. Choose which of the three is the strongest photograph (not the most "correct" one) and defend it. Exposure is a decision, not a right answer.

Part C — Composition and light still rule (Five Conditions & Recreate It)

Exercise 22.9 ⭐ — Grid on, thirds applied. Turn on your camera app's rule-of-thirds grid. Make five photographs that each place the subject or horizon deliberately on a third line or a power point. No center-punched subjects allowed. The grid is a crutch you use until thirds become automatic.

Exercise 22.10 ⭐⭐ — Recreate the window-light portrait. Recreate Figure 22.2 with your phone: a person turned three-quarters toward a window, framed against a plain background you found by moving until the clutter dropped out, the near eye tapped to focus, exposure nudged to protect the bright cheek. The challenge is that the phone gives you no background blur to hide behind — you must compose a genuinely clean frame and use the light. Keep the best; it may feed the Portfolio.

Exercise 22.11 ⭐⭐ — One subject, five lights. Pick one ordinary subject and photograph it on your phone in five different lights: hard direct sun, open shade, soft window light, golden-hour warmth, and after-dark with a lamp. Same subject, same phone, five frames. Self-select the best three and write why light — not the camera — made them. This is the chapter's thesis made visible.

Exercise 22.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Beat the "phone look." Deliberately make one harsh, flat, front-lit "phone selfie–style" photo (light straight on the face), then make a second of the same person in soft directional window light. Caption each with the cause of how it looks. Prove to yourself that the disparaged "phone look" is a lighting failure, not a phone failure.

Part D — Beating the small sensor (Fix the Photo & Shoot This)

Exercise 22.13 ⭐⭐ — Fix the noisy night shot. A described failed shot: "Handheld phone photo of friends at a dim bar; the whole image is speckly and soft, faces smeared, shot at 1× on full Auto, pinch-zoomed to 3× to fill the frame." Diagnose every error against the four small-sensor limits, then prescribe the exact re-shoot (light, mode, steadiness, zoom).

Exercise 22.14 ⭐⭐ — The natural-blur portrait. Without using Portrait mode, make a phone portrait (or object shot) with a genuinely soft background, using only the optical methods from §22.4: get physically close, put lots of distance behind the subject, and use your phone's telephoto lens if it has one. Then shoot the same subject with Portrait mode and compare the edges (hair, glasses, gaps). Which separation looks more natural, and where does the synthetic version break?

Exercise 22.15 ⭐⭐ — Hold the impossible range. Find a scene that defeats a single exposure (bright window behind a shaded interior, or a bright sky over a dark foreground). Shoot it with HDR off and HDR on. Note exactly what each end of the tonal range does in each version. Then shoot a third frame that avoids the problem by changing your angle or waiting for softer light. Three ways to handle dynamic range; keep all three.

Exercise 22.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Zoom with your feet. Choose a subject across a space. Make one frame by pinch-zooming the phone to fill it, and one by walking close enough to fill it at 1× (or an optical stop). Compare sharpness, detail, and — often — the angle. Write why "zoom with your feet" is the rule on a phone, and note the one situation where you genuinely couldn't walk closer (and what you'd do instead).

Part E — Accessories, real or improvised (Shoot This)

Exercise 22.17 ⭐ — The improvised tripod. Without buying anything, steady your phone on a ledge, wall, or stack of books and make a long, low-ISO exposure (smoothed water, a dim room, a night street, or a self-portrait via timer). Compare it to the same shot handheld. Note what steadiness alone bought you. This is the highest-value "accessory" in photography, for free.

Exercise 22.18 ⭐⭐ — The improvised reflector. By a window, photograph a small still life or a face twice: once with a sheet of white paper or card held opposite the window to bounce light into the shadow side, once without. Same everything else. Note how the bounced fill changed the shadows. Light beats glass; you just proved it with a piece of paper.

Exercise 22.19 ⭐⭐ — Name the accessory you'd actually buy. Audit your own phone shooting for one month (real or from memory). What photograph do you keep failing to make? Match it to exactly one accessory category from §22.5 (steadiness, light, macro, gimbal, mic) and justify the purchase by naming the recurring shot it would solve. If you can't name the shot, the honest answer is "none yet."

Part F — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 22.20 ⭐⭐ — Phone long exposure (Chapter 21 on a phone). Using your phone braced or on a small tripod, in pro/manual mode, make a long-exposure frame: a half-second to several seconds of smoothed water, light trails, or a blurred crowd. Bring Chapter 21's thinking (steadiness, low ISO, the histogram in the dark) to the phone's two-control exposure. Keep the best.

Exercise 22.21 ⭐⭐ — Phone macro (looking ahead to Chapter 19). Get as close as your phone (or a clip-on macro) will focus on a small textured subject — a flower, a leaf, a fabric weave. Use the phone's deep depth of field for you (front-to-back sharpness up close) and a distant background to soften behind. Note how close-up turns an ordinary object into a landscape.

Exercise 22.22 ⭐⭐ — Phone street frame (Chapters 6 & 10). At the busy intersection or market, make one phone street frame that combines a strong composition (Chapter 6) with a decisive moment (Chapter 10). Use the phone's discretion to your advantage and observe the consent/ethics guidance you'll formalize in Chapter 17. Pre-set your exposure (lock it) so you're ready for the instant rather than fumbling.

Exercise 22.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — The same scene, phone and camera. If you own a dedicated camera, shoot the same scene with both it and your phone, doing your honest best on each. Edit both. Then show the pair to someone and ask which is which. Write what genuinely differed (and whether it was a creative difference or merely a technical one). This is the chapter's central claim, put to the test.

Part G — The Light Log & seeing

Exercise 22.24 ⭐ — Light Log: the phone-camera moment. Add a Light Log entry about a moment this week when the only camera you had was your phone. What did you notice about the light? Did you shoot it, or talk yourself out of it because "it's just a phone"? Name the photograph you did or didn't make.

Exercise 22.25 ⭐⭐ — Light Log: the computed photo. Find a photo on your phone that you suspect the computer heavily shaped (an obvious HDR look, a Night-mode frame, a Portrait-mode cutout). Describe in your Light Log what the computation clearly added and, if you can spot it, where it faked or failed something. This primes you for Chapter 23.

Part H — Reflection and Portfolio

Exercise 22.26 ⭐⭐ — The Portfolio piece. Execute the chapter's Portfolio Checkpoint in full: a deliberate, driven, edited, phone-only image good enough to sit beside your best camera work. Choose a subject and light that suit the phone; make the four decisions on purpose; shoot RAW; beat the relevant limit; shoot many and choose one; develop it. Add it to your Portfolio and mark it "phone only."

Exercise 22.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — The "it's just a phone" rebuttal. Write a short paragraph (or record yourself) rebutting the claim that "you need a real camera to make good photographs," using your own phone-only Portfolio frame as the evidence. Name what the camera would and wouldn't have changed. Teaching the argument is how you'll know you believe it.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 22.28 ⭐⭐⭐ — One week, phone only. For seven days, make every photograph on your phone — no dedicated camera, no exceptions — and one Light Log entry a day. Drive the phone deliberately each time (pro/manual, exposure lock, RAW). At week's end, lay the seven best frames out together. You will almost certainly find that the constraint sharpened your seeing, because you couldn't lean on gear. Note which day's image is strongest and why — and whether it would honestly look any different on a "real" camera.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with your phone before reading them — in photography, the attempt is the lesson, and this is the one camera you can never claim you didn't have.