“I arrived in Australia in 2003 with no touchstones whatsoever. After ten years of squashing the arts and the web together, often as uncomfortable bed-fellows, I left all of my professional, social, geographical and familial communities behind in the UK. My Australian address book was empty. Where to look, what to find?”

The Value Exchange is the title of my longform essay published in this month’s Desktop Magazine, Issue #294 In The Neighbourhood.

Following a fairly open community-minded brief, I attempt to pull together my career threads of FBi Radio, New Weird Australia and The Nest, and weave in parallels with social media communities, ever in flux.  Find out more information about the issue at desktopmag.com.au, or pick up a copy at Mag Nation, Beautiful Pages, and other well-informed newsagents.

Illustration by James Gulliver Hancock & Kate Banazi for Desktop

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The Guardian Australia launched today (in digital form only) – and I was surprised and more than a little delighted to find myself quoted in their first edition, in an article titled ‘Ten thoughts to take from Sydney Writers’ Festival‘.

Referencing last week’s panel, Reading In The E-Future, they note:

On cliffhangers: In a panel on Reading In The E-Future, digital publisher Stuart Buchanan noted the way in which Amazon models that give you the first two thousand words to download for free have affected the way writers are composing novels, with authors writing their cliffhangers to end at precisely that two thousand word point.

At the panel, I do recall waving my hand liberally in the air to suggest a caveat was due – the above is true to a point, although the cut off point is 10% of the total word count, not 2,000 words.  Given that average number of words for novels allegedly start at 40,000 words (thanks, Wikipedia), this would mean that the average free sample clocks in at a minimum of 4,000 words.

For writers aspiring to this cliffhanger tactic, it’s tricky to pull off.  You essentially need to rewrite that first 10% once you know your final word count – being careful not to increase your overall count during the edit, so as not to knock the cliffhanger out of sync.  Seems like quite a headache, but it’s an odd and interesting quirk of publishing on Amazon.

Photo: Rob Whitworth / Alamy/Alam via The Guardian

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Today I sat on a Sydney Writers Festival panel with Eli Horowitz (creator of The Silent History), Mauro Bedoni from COLORS Magazine, Dr Neil James (Executive Director of the Plain English Foundation) and Digireado‘s Anna Maguire – all attempting to answer the question “Is technology changing how and what we read?”

If you couldn’t make it along, or are otherwise hungry for the Cliff Notes version, here’s my takeaways from the session:

• Eli Horowitz didn’t own an iPhone while co-writing the incredible multi-part novel ‘The Silent History’ – one of the first books created and delivered specifically for smartphone and tablet devices.  The fact that he didn’t sit around fiddling with the device while he wrote the book only makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

• ‘The Silent History’ took three years to write and develop, but Horowitz avoided potential pitfalls of consistent device and software updates by keeping the work conceptual and non-device specific.  He felt that if it became too reliant on (for example) any particular facet of the iPhone operating system, that would inevitably have lead to multiple problems throughout the lifecycle.

• Readers are invited to submit ‘Field Reports’ to extend the world of ‘The Silent History’.  Anyone can submit content from a geo-tagged location which Eli and the team will then sub-edit and publish on an in-app map.   Australian readers have submitted more Field Reports per capita than anywhere else in the world.  (Cue panel joke about how Australians love ‘per capita’ statistics)

• Fears that technology may lead to a literary dumbing down, surface-level engagement or an invasion of txt wtht vwls are seemingly unfounded and not corroborated by research.  In fact, Dr Neil James intimated that the opposite was often the case – we read more and write more than ever before (a fact corroborated by the excellent Literary Journal panel I attended later in the afternoon).  He also noted that there’s no evidence to suggest that surfing from content to content in a non-linear way was in any way harmful to our brains – I never knew that anyone thought such a thing, but apparently it is a concern!

• In a discussion around using apps in art galleries (only moderately off-topic…), Mauro Bedoni from COLORS cited research which noted that most art gallery visitors spend 2-3 seconds looking at the artwork, and 30-40 seconds reading the wall text.

• Even though most in-app analytics will be able to give you a fairly good understanding of how people might be reading your e-book or digital publication, Eli Horowitz wasn’t sure he wanted to know – asking the question “what would you do with that information as an author?”.  I find that we use the data to improve navigation or pagination, but not necessarily to alter the creative work itself.  Here I referenced David Walsh from MONA – who have an in-gallery app where you can Like or Dislike an artwork – who noted perversely that the most Disliked works have the greatest chance of remaining on show.

• Eli put a sharp pin in the bubble of technofear by turning it 180 degrees. He asked us to imagine what would happen if print was introduced to a digital world.  “You mean I open the page and I’m locked into this world for 400 pages?  I can’t go anywhere else or in any other direction other than forward?”  Terrifying.

• We didn’t get to show Mauro Bedoni’s video on the COLORS news machine, but I’d recommend checking it out on their Vimeo channel in all its mad glory.  Also, COLORS iPad edition is currently free – flagging that there’s little excuse to get on the download.

Finally, when Anna Maguire was enquiring about about “the book going mobile”, I couldn’t help but think, “haven’t books always been mobile?”.  I know, I should have made a Dad-joke about it – opportunity lost.

Image from @TabulaRasaAU via Twitter

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You can read an interview with me in the latest issue of the renowned national design magazine, Design Quarterly, in a piece which names The Nest one of the “Top Ten Forces & Faces in Australian Design”.

In their annual review of the Australian design and architecture industry, Design Quarterly conducted “a rigorous review of the practitioners and business leaders who are injecting new growth and prosperity into the industry – whether through new ventures, inventions, initiatives or activities”.

Dubbing The Nest as “Sydney’s rising star of digital creative agencies“, Design Quarterly noted that “The Nest’s approach is somehow revolutionary in its simplicity – getting things just right in a perpetually evolving digital sphere”.

Click the image below to read the full article:

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I’ll be appearing on a panel at this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, titled Reading in the E-Future, looking at the ways in which technology is changing the way we read.

The panel includes Eli Horowitz, the co-creator of The Silent History, prosaically  dubbed “a serialized, exploratory novel for the iPad and iPhone”.  From what I’ve uncovered thus far, I can say that The Silent History is a unique and compelling experience, one that takes no prisoners as far as traditional narrative is concerned.  Eli was also managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney’s – a journal that became a well-loved publishing empire, blowing a delicious raspberry in the face of literary industry doomsayers.

Also joining us is Quintin Schevernels, the CEO of Layar – one of the foremost proponents of mobile augmented reality technology, early to the table and quick to establish a well-deserved foothold in the market.  They recently adapated their business model to target the publishing industry more directly, so it’ll be interesting to hear what Quintin has to say about their upcoming plans and projects.

There’s also Dr Neil James from the Plain English Foundation, cited as “an expert in the rhetoric of writing”.  His latest book Modern Manglish “skewers the worst excesses of buzzwords and suit speak”, so I’ll need to employ my own internal jargon-radar and be on my best behaviour.

We’re marshalled by Anna Maguire, blogger and editor of the excellent Digireado, a site dedicated to digital reading and publishing.

I’ll be talking about the work of Branches, our digital journal Cuttings and our new iPad app for the renowned Australian text, Summer of The Seventeenth Doll.

The panel takes place on Friday 24th May at 1pm at Wharf Theatre 2, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay.  Tickets from swf.org.au.

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First posted on The Nest blog, February 2013.

I came to the conclusion only recent that I am officially a “Magazine Junkie” – and, while we’re at it, I’m also a borderline hoarder. Two confessions for the price of one.

I simply cannot buy enough magazines – trimmed to perfection, bursting with colour and looking resplendent in all their glossy, shiny goodness. I’ve always loved them, and always bought them, but I hadn’t quite fathomed the depth of my obsession until the gargantuan pile next to my bed started to look as it was about to topple over and kill a small child.

You might find some irony in the idea of someone who spends all day every day talking digital, going home and finding solace in a stack of printed paper. If that were true, it would make a good story – but that’s not the angle. I adore magazines both for their bravado and for so beautifully encapsulating a moment in time. Every spread is a new idea, a fresh playpen for design innovation, and it will forever tell us what was so special about ‘right now’. The length of the curatorial hand and the precision of the art direction have both been honed to perfection in the magazine format – every dot on each page has been checked and rechecked before it goes to press. The paper stock, the pantone, the weight, the bleach – everything last tiny detail has been considered. (Perhaps to my other confessions, I can add obsessive compulsive perfectionist?)

In the tsunami of chatter swelling around the idea that “print is dead”, you would be forgiven for thinking that the writing was on the wall for the precious magazine. It’s true that magazines, like most print formats, have suffered in the digital age, as we find new avenues to satiate our fix of specialist information, those finer details, the freshly snapped photos and the wild ideas. Quite simply, magazines (for all their finesse) cannot keep up with the temporal nature of the web – it is simply too fast, too spritely, too god damn nimble. Of course, most magazines have their own web sites, social media pages, blogs, Instagram channels and more besides – but this is not the same experience, not by a long shot. These channels are merely fragments, a tasting plate and not the full ‘eat all you want’ buffet. As newsprint titles have found time and time again, the more editorial you give away for free, the less likely people are to buy your title.

The other longstanding (i.e. centuries old) issue for print titles is that of distribution. How do you get your printed publication into the hands of your readers, and do it quickly? One downside of living in Australia, on the underside of the globe, is that publications from Europe and America sadly do not arrive here instantaneously, as if by magic. Rather, they take a long time – weeks, or months even. If you’re lucky, some of the more popular titles might come with a “Latest Issue By Air” sticker on the front, denoting that they’re merely three weeks old, not three months past their sell-by date. Wherever we are on the globe, however close we live to a forward thinking newsagent, we cannot ever have access to those print titles instantaneously. We can’t feel that sense of “newness”, the feeling that something important has arrived, brand new, in our hands, within mere moments of the publishers declaring it to be “ready”.

Or can we?

Well, hello ‘digital publishing’.

With the advent of this new medium, most major print titles are now actually available for you to read at the very same moment as they being loaded onto a palate in a factory somewhere in darkest regional back-of-beyond. They’re available to read on your iPad, your Android tablet, your Kindle Fire and more besides. They arrive immediately, via official magazine apps, and often cost much less than if you we’re picking them up off the shelf. Every week, more and more titles that you love are debuting on tablet devices, and most of them carry an easy subscription model that will deliver the new issue to your tablet while you sleep.

You will now be rightly asking the question “but surely the experience is not the same”? After all, I did make a passionate case for print only a few paragraphs ago – some rant to do with weight, and smell and colour and the like. I know, but stay with me.

One of the arguments against the e-book format is that they don’t feel like a “real book”. I couldn’t agree more. They don’t feel anything like books, no matter how much Apple invest in trying to fake the experience with wooden-panelled iBookshelves and ropey curled corners.

For me, the joy of books is that every book is different – forget about the words on the page for a moment (admittedly an odd request), consider rather that every book looks different. The cover image, the back cover type layout, the spine colour, the choice of font, the line spacing, the chapter layout – each book handles these very differently, whereas (with the exception of the cover image), e-book readers handle these all the same, all the time. All that is unique about the book design is stripped away in the e-book format, in many respects removing a disturbingly large slice of its unique essence. The book has become entirely homogenised and thus much less interesting.

Magazines, however, are a different beast. The digital edition of magazine titles not only allows the magazine to retain every pixel of its original design, it can also take that design somewhere else entirely. When digital publications first emerged, much was made of the fact that they were often ’pixel for pixel’ translations. This was a fundamental fail – magazines were often twice the size of the tablet, and thus became almost impossible to read when reduced. Pinching and zooming every page is no way to be enthralled.

Fortunately, the next (and current) wave of digital magazines is writing that wrong. The brave new world of the empty page can now be filled with all manner of wonders. Magazines are often now being radically redesigned for tablet, or in some cases, are even going ‘tablet first’. Legibility is often no longer an issue. What’s more, designers of these titles are increasingly aware of what works when it comes to augmenting the title with photographic slideshows, animated illustrations, interactive diagrams and embedded videos. All of these elements, far from being the emperor’s new clothes, are genuinely enhancing our reading experience – immersing us deeper into the content and context of the magazine format.

There is also the major consideration of the environmental impact of print – we could, forgive the pun, write a book on that subject alone. Consider the ridiculous environment footprint required to bring magazines to our door – particularly international titles, straddling oceans and continents for our moment of pleasure. That alone beggars belief, but also look around you in cafes, venues and stores and you’ll find piles of free papers, magazines and brochures, waiting to be monetarily consumed and then discarded. That’s literally truckloads of obsolete print waiting to be sent back to the recycling dump. But I digress…

As both a magazine junkie and a firm believer in the advance of digital culture, ‘digital publishing’ has become the sweet spot for me. It has everything I love about magazines (considered and curated content, married with excellence in design) with everything I love about digital (fast access, interactivity, engagement, currency).

That’s why we’ve started up a sister company to The Nest, an offshoot that could only be called ‘Branches‘. It specialises in the delivery of digital publishing, interactive magazines, books and brochures – and, with The Branches Imprint, we’re publishing our own titles too. Our quarterly anthology of new Australian writing “Cuttings” was released this week, and our interactive version of the classic Australian play “The Summer of The Seventeenth Doll” will land next month, in a collaboration with Currency Press.

As for my precarious tower of bedside magazines, it is now slowly dwindling as those same titles find themselves magically transported onto the iPad. And, you’ll be pleased to hear, small children are still alive to tell the tale.

The post Taking stock – on digital publishing and the future of magazines appeared first on Stuart Buchanan.

It’s been a long gestation, but I’m finally pleased to announce the launch of a digital publishing venture, The Branches Imprint. Born of our work at Branches Publishing, we launch with out first original title, Cuttings - an interactive quarterly anthology of new Australian writing.

Leaving the e-book format behind, Cuttings represents a new way of bringing writing to life – a free, full-colour, digital-only publication, exposing new talent and new ideas from around Australia, married with unique and original design, illustration and photography.

Available now for iPad and Android tablets, the 28-page launch issue of Cuttings – titled A Cosy Catastrophe - offers a time capsule of texts, or postcards for a post-apocalyptic future, striving to sum up for generations to come what it really meant to live in Australia in 2013.  The digital format allows the text to be presented and explored in new ways – with layers of visual interaction, video & audio content, social sharing and contextual links, which together provide a rich and immersive reading experience.

Cuttings gathers together contributions from a wild bunch of up and coming and emerging writers - Sophie Braham, Wilfred Brandt, Cleo Braithwaite, A.H. Cayley, Bryn Desmond-Jones, Theodore Ell, Steph Harmon, Antonia Hayes, Elmo Keep, Lee Tran Lam, Max Lavergne, Tessa Lunney, Tom McMullen (Shag), Max Quinn, Matt Roden, Sam Twyford-Moore, Nadine Von Cohen and M.B. Windle - wrapped in a cover featuring photography by Cybele Malinowski.

For Cuttings, Branches has brought on board editors Angela Bennetts & Alice Fenton, co-directors of the National Young Writers Festival and the founders of the Even Books project.

Future issues of Cuttings will feature longer-form texts, and contributions are currently being sought from interested writers.  The next issue, titled In Real Life – will be released in May 2013.  Prospective contributors are encouraged to download the app for full submission details.

Cuttings is available free for iPad and iPad Mini in the App Store and for Android on Google Play,

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The Nest’s apps for the Art Gallery Of New South Wales are this week featured in Concrete Playground’s list of ‘Ten Best Art Apps’.  Described as “an online weather vane pointing you to the cultural tornadoes that are just about to hit”, Concrete Playground prowls Sydney, Melbourne,  Brisbane and Auckland to pluck out the best of what’s happening in the arts and cultural worlds.

Of our ‘Contemporary’ and ‘Australian’ apps for Art Gallery Of New South Wales, they say: “Produced in association with The Nest, the Art Gallery of NSW’s two companion apps for iPad do a couple of things really well: they provide richly detailed vision of the gallery’s most celebrated works, and they do it in a really interesting interface that encourages browsing by feel and intuition. Once you focus on a work you like, you can also take in additional material, such as sketches, photos, and curator insights.”

The top ten list  also includes apps from the Tate, MOMA and Sydney’s Museum Of Contemporary Art.  Read the full article at concreteplayground.com.au.

Find out more about the apps and the stories behind The Nest’s work for Art Gallery Of New South Wales in this Case Study.

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When asked by arts clients about how audiences are using technology, I often reference the 2011 Australia Council For The Arts report, Connecting Arts Audiences Online. This was a much-needed reality check, offering real data about digital engagement amongst local arts audiences. It remains a handy tool and is worth further investigation, however the bulk of the research would have been carried out in late 2010 or early 2011, and its currency is therefore dating fast. Two years in digital terms is an epoch, and we can’t now vouch for the integrity of much of the data.

Enter Group Of Minds, and their Principal Ron Evans. I had the good fortune to hear Ron speak at the 2012 Australia Council Marketing Summit – seeing him talk, I initially thought to myself, “here’s a man who loves his data”. Yet it became clear that Ron was more than just a number-cruncher – pragmatic and level-headed he may be, but he was also clearly passionate about how hyper-relevant data could force us to challenge and rethink our approach and our strategies. It’s there to be interrogated and understood, and – even when it smacks in the face with a home truth we’d rather avoid – it’s there to be used.

In 2009, Group of Minds Arts were commissioned by Arts Council Silicon Valley to “research the mobile preferences of arts patrons”. The research was updated in September of last year after a three-year gap, and as Ron notes in the introduction to the findings: “The goal of the research was to discover current usage of mobile phones in relation to arts activities; measure potential near-future usage; and explore key expectations for the medium in preparation for building mobile-based apps and websites for U.S. arts consumers“. The sample size was approximately 2,000, made up of active users of online arts sites, spread across six cities.

I’m interested in this data as it is representative of a traditional, mainstream arts demographic (the largest group of respondents was aged 48-62, with 72% of respondents being female). Forget about how younger audiences are forging a new paradigm for mobile engagement, this report should help to answer a different question – do older, mainstream arts audiences really want to engage using mobiles? And if so, how?

Here’s some key points that I pulled from the report:

• 38% of users owned iPhones, compared to 25% owning Android devices (21% noted that they didn’t own a web-enabled smartphone, the remaining percentage were users of phones such as Blackberry, Windows and such like)
• 70% said they would use their phone to look up arts events, and 19% had already visited an arts organisation’s social media channels on their phone. However, 54% say they use Facebook either all the time or “sometimes,” so there’s a clear disconnect between their everyday use of those channels, and their willingness to engage with arts organisations through the same method.
• 16.5% had visited a mobile-optimised site belonging to an arts organisation — this number is sure to grow as more and more sites are updated for mobile usage. However, 39% said that they had researched event info on their phones – which suggests that a large percentage are getting a less-than optimal mobile experience when they land on a site.
• 50% claimed to have used their phones to take photos before, during or after a performance, 21% shot video, and 32% used Facebook in the same situation (were they sharing, or just bored?)
• 21% have used mobiles to buy tickets – again, this figure will significantly increase when the end-to-end purchase can be completely fulfilled on mobile
• When asked “what mobile features would improve your experience of arts and cultural events?”, directions, proximity and parking information all scored a large 75%, 78% and 79% respectively. 58% wanted information on places to eat and drink nearby. Interestingly, 39% said that they wanted better ways to send info about the event to their friends, and 25% wanted content from the organisation that they could repost on social media

So here’s my key takeaways – the dot points from the dot points, if you will:

• Mobile use patterns, along with the requirements and expectations of audiences far outstrips supply – the % of mobile optimised sites is still worrying low, compared to the number of requests that are being made
• People want practical assistance when ‘on the go’ – a desktop experience might sell the sizzle, but a mobile experience needs to offer logistical support related to the actual visit (and potential social activities before and after)
• There’a a demand for content to share, a demand to take photos and videos – whether they think in these terms or not, arts audiences want to act as ambassadors, tell their networks about their experiences and encourage them to attend. Yet many organisations are still blocking that pathway – often actively discouraging this type of activity. You needn’t be opening the floodgates for audiences to video all performances, but rather finding ways to offer more sharable content via social media, and offering ‘moments’ where photography is not only permitted but encouraged.

Ron offers his own recommendations and findings in the conclusion of the report – which you can download free from the Groups Of Minds web site. Of course, there’s also a handy mobile-optimised version of the report – perfect for a quick browse while you’re waiting for the curtain to rise at your next theatre show.

How does this compare with your own research or expectations?  What sort of mobile experience should you be offering your audience or customers? 

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At The Nest, we’ve called on Oliver to help judge a mobile photography competition for The Rocks Village Bizarre - more info over on our Village Bizarre blog (top prize includes a one-on-one photography lesson with Oliver plus accommodation & dinner at The Rocks).  We asked him to give us some top tips for aspiring mobile photographers, which we’ve edited and posted on the blog.  Here though, I’m posting  the full unedited transcript of the interview – there’s some great advice in here, and if you want to see these ideas in action, follow @oggsie on Instagram.

Photos taken from @oggsie’s Instagram feed, (c) Oliver Lang.

1. What props or equipment are essential for your craft?

An iPhone, although I must add that the recent Samsung (Android) mobile phones also have excellent quality camera in them too (I’ve been testing the Samsung Galaxy S3 and I’m really impressed).

But it’s not just the hardware, it’s the third party camera apps that are essential to quality mobile photography. In my experience with both iPhone and Android phones it’s the iOS (iPhone) applications that have the best design to intuitive mobile photography. I think that the best iPhone camera app is ProCamera. It allows you to separately control focus and exposure using a fast and intuitive locking function. It also has a full screen shutter button that gives you better photographic control. On Android phones the Camera FV-5 app does give you the same control, but it’s much less responsive and lacks the full screen trigger function for now.

Speed and control are important for adapting to changing lighting and compositions, and this is why ProCamera is so important to my images. It’s the app I teach people to use in my iPhone Photography course at the Australian Centre for Photography.

2. How much training per day, and for how many years, do you need to put in to get to your level?

I’m not formally trained in photography, but I certainly admit to having a healthy obsession. Photography is a journey, so I don’t think I have really reached a “level”, I’m just at the point I am now by chasing light and sharing images online.

I’ve been shooting with any mobile phone that would take a picture, but I think I started to really understand what I was trying to do at the start of 2011. In that year I founded the Mobile Photo Group with other mobile photographers from around the world, and organised the iPhone Photography exhibition at the 2011 Head On Photo Festival.

3. If you had to single out 3 characteristics that you need to be a good photographer, what would they be?

Visual curiosity, continual failure and good light.

All photography is about light, curiosity and failure. I’ve taken tens of thousands of images with my mobile phone. I’m always interested in framing what I see, and I’m drawn towards good light. Good light is light that you can use to make an image incredible.

I don’t think these three characteristics are specific to mobile photography, they apply to almost any other photographer, I’ve just gone through the process with my iPhone.

4. Don’t try this if …

No, do try this, take pictures and explore how you can frame the world.

But don’t share everything you shoot, quality not quantity. Mobile photography is as much about choosing what to share as it is about taking the photo.

But don’t let the need to take a photo get in the way of an experience.

Drink your coffee, listen to the live music, and eat your food – these are not the experiences that need photographs. Of course I’ve broken this rule too, but I try not to do it often.

5. What sets the average mobile photography apart from the exceptional mobile photography is:

Photographs that are an experience are exceptional; photographs of an experience are the average.

Photographs of an experience are reliant heavily on the nature of the content in an image, usually a thing, a scene or an object. These images are not bad, but often they’re simply cliché images of sunsets, cats, rainbows and silhouetted figures images. There’s usually nothing in the image which sets it apart from another image of the object. These images are average because they’re so common, and you can almost blame mobile photography for that.

But I’ve also seen exceptional versions of each of these cliché images – where the photographer has created an image that is more than simply the sunset or the rainbow. These images are a photographic experience, they show vision and creativity. A photograph that is an experience needs to have quality content and photographic composition – and it’s also good to have a relevant context when you share it online.

Average uses filters, exceptional uses light.

6. WARNING! FLASH!

Flash, mobile phone flash is a last resort, it’s the “phone a friend lifeline” equivalent of mobile photography, and honestly your friend isn’t bright enough. Get it?

Self-pictures, especially when shot using the lower quality front camera (screen side) on your mobile phone. Unless you’re trying to hide your age (low quality images really help hide wrinkles) use the camera on the back, it will give you a much better quality photo.

7. Be discreet, not creepy …

Taking pictures with a mobile phone allows you to be discreet and capture much more natural looking scenes. Photography has a long history of discreet photographic practices, and mobile photography is certainly the latest in the chain. But don’t just take sneaky photos because you can, that’s just creepy.

8. A sure way to look like an amateur whilst taking a photo with your mobile phone is …

Using flash. Especially during the daytime or when you’re in the crowd at a concert – the people in front of you don’t need to know you’re taking a photo.

9. No matter what, don’t forget to:

Have fun with light.

There are a lot of photo editing apps, but it’s the quality of the image you take that is more important than any app you use to edit. So learn how to control exposure settings on your mobile phone.

10. One last golden piece of advice you’d offer to the aspiring mobile photographer is:

Charge your phone. Taking photos drains battery fast, so be prepared.

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