How can I capture portrait with mobile?

Why not?

After-all its a camera, and has to perform what you aspire to do with it!!!

This is the most common question asked by many people. Here I have attempted to shed some light on this question.

Before doing a portrait photography session with the mobile camera you need to understand what you need to have more to make the portrait more appealing. This applies to portrait photography in general, whether you use a mobile camera, or a point and shoot camera, or a cropped sensor camera or a full frame camera. Speaking exclusively about the mobile photography the basic thing that we should know is that mobile phones haveSmall image sensor, which implies the image quality will largely depend on the quality of light available for making a photo, and the lens used by the mobile phones is a fixed lens of Wide Angle Lens type.

1. Proper Lighting: This an important aspect of every photo that you make. Illuminating the the subject in an artistic way is the real skill as a photographer. And to know what light makes your photo look very good is an essential instinct to be a successful photographer. For mobile photography you can capture good photos when you have plenty of good quality light on your subject. When I say quality of light, it means the softness of the light plus the intensity. For example you can imagine two scenes: 1. Outdoor Light during rainy and cloudy day, is soft and low intense. 2. Outdoor Light during the sunny day at 12 noon, is harsh creating high contrast images with harsh and unpleasant shadows. So while clicking on your mobile phones, consider to pose your subject (model) besides a window covered with a white curtain. This will act like a flash source (i.e. window) with a diffuser (i.e. curtain) over it, and will give a nice one sided constant light on the face of the model. Try to adjust the distance of the model from the window on the basis of the exposure levels that you get after clicking a picture. This whole thing is in short, adjusting the power of your flash source Manually. You can add some additional lighting by the other mobile torch, but try avoiding the camera flash which will make the image look dull and flat.
2. Type of Lens: The mobile's wide angle lens creates a natural distortion in the image when clicked from very small distance. This is a peculiar thing observed when we use a wide angle lens, the world in front of a wide angle lens gets distorted. The straight lines do not remain straight anymore and start appearing curved. This effect though appears pleasing for landscape photography, may not feel appropriate to portrait photography. Everyone loves the way they look naturally, and the work of the photographer is to enhance that image in the model's mind and not to degrade it. Hence for the mobile photography we have to decrease the distortion. The distortion can be minimised by placing the subject far from the camera. But this might lead to reduction in details in the image. Details are the fine elements and sharpness in the image which highlight the models facial or body features without pixelating. Other thing that can be done if we want to preserve the details and still remove the wide angle distortion is that we can add an additional lens over the mobile camera lens. This will change the wide angle lens into a zoom lens. Most of the world class photographers consider 50mm to 105mm as the best range for portrait photography and especially 85mm being the most favourite amongst them.
3. Avoid Cropping: This is very important in a way to preserve the details on the image. Cropping the image just magnifies the image digitally and does not affect the image aesthetically. So avoid the image cropping unnecessarily, and instead you can step forward or backwards for framing the image properly before clicking the image.
4. Using a Tripod: Image quality improves drastically when a tripod or a gorillapod is used for capturing the images. You can also use a table to rest your camera and use a self timer mode to capture images to eliminate the hand-shake which reflects in the photograph. The photos appear lot sharper when a they are firmly kept on something rather than shot hand-held

I hope these are the basic things which should be kept in mind when we are photographing a portrait by a mobile phone.