Photo ideas for Instagram, with the setup that makes each one work

Eight ideas for daylight

• Rim-light walk. Thirty to forty minutes before sunset, put the sun directly behind the subject's head, stand four metres back at 2x, lock exposure on the face and add roughly +0.7 EV. The background blows out slightly and the hair catches a gold edge.
• Shadow on a wall. Between about 4pm and 6pm, find a plain sunlit wall and stand so your shadow falls across it, then photograph the shadow rather than the person. The low sun stretches the shape and the wall is the only background.
• Burst jump. Hold the shutter down for a burst, jump on three, then keep the frame where the feet are highest and the hands are relaxed. A single tap gets the moment wrong nearly every time.
• Walking away, looking back. The subject walks away to about six metres, then turns their head on a count. Shoot at 2x so the street compresses behind them. The turn is what makes the face live rather than pose.
• From below, against the sky. Put the phone about 20 centimetres off the ground and tilt up. The background becomes clean sky rather than parked cars and bins, which is the fastest way to remove clutter without moving anywhere.
• Stairwell symmetry. Centre the phone in the middle of a stairwell or an escalator shaft, hold it level, and shoot at 1x. Keeping the phone perfectly level is the whole trick, because a degree of tilt destroys a symmetrical frame.
• Hand and cup at 2x. Seated, daylight from the side, shot from your own eye level rather than above, at 2x from 40 centimetres. Overhead coffee flat lays are the most photographed image on earth; a side-lit one from seated height is not.
• Crowd blur. Have a friend stand still in a busy place, shoot a Live Photo and hold the phone steady for two seconds, then in Photos swipe up on the image and choose Long Exposure. Everyone else smears and your subject stays sharp.

Seven for dusk and after dark

• Shop window at dusk. Stand at about 45 degrees to a lit shop window in the twenty minutes after sunset. You get your reflection and the interior in the same frame, and the angle stops the phone flash and your own silhouette blocking the middle.
• Cool sky, warm face. Just after sunset the sky is deep blue and any lamp or shop doorway is orange. Put the face within a metre of the warm source with the blue sky behind, and the temperature split does the work.
• Flash detail. Hard direct flash at 1.5 metres on hands, rings, a table, a drink, a jacket sleeve. Detail shots take flash much better than faces do, because texture is what flash is good at.
• Car window at night. From the passenger seat, rest the phone against the door frame to steady it and shoot the street through the glass, especially when it is raining. The glass turns every light into a smear of colour.
• Traffic long exposure. Brace the phone on a wall or railing, shoot a Live Photo of moving traffic, then convert it to Long Exposure in Photos. Hand-held gives a blurry photo rather than light trails.
• Silhouette against the last light. Face the brightest part of the sky, tap and hold on the sky to lock exposure, then drag down about a stop. Keep a gap of light visible between arms and body or the shape reads as a blob.
• Mid-laugh. Count "three, two, one" and then say something instead of shooting on one, and keep shooting for two seconds after. Every genuinely good candid photo of a friend is taken immediately after they expected the photo to happen.

Every idea, what you need, best light

What the good ones have in common

Three properties turn up in every idea on this page, and once you can see them you can invent your own.

The subject is separated from the background. By distance, by brightness, or by colour temperature. A person a metre in front of a busy wall has none of those and no editing rescues it. The same person six metres out, shot at 2x, has all three.

There is one dominant light, and you know where it is. Behind the head, to one side, or hard from the front. Ideas that fail are usually lit by everything at once, which is what midday sun in an open square or a room with four ceiling spots gives you.

Something is moving or about to. A step, a turn, a laugh that has just started, hair still settling. Static photos of people standing still are the ones that look posed, and the fix is a count, a walk or a burst rather than a better pose. If posing is the sticking point, how to pose for photos is the longer version.

Shooting for the shape you will post in

Instagram shows feed photos at 4:5 at most, which is 1080 x 1350 pixels, so a frame composed at 4:3 loses its sides when you crop later. Set the camera to 4:5 before you shoot, and remember the profile grid trims the top and bottom again to make its 3:4 tile.

For carousels, the first slide sets the shape for every slide after it, so put your tallest photo first unless you want the rest padded or cropped to something shorter. That single rule prevents most photo dump layout problems.

One of ours, not yet released: ShutterAI has Wave to Shoot, a palm gesture that fires the shutter so you can set the phone on a wall and take the walking-away or jump shots on this page without a friend or a ten-second countdown, along with Best Face for picking the usable frame out of a burst. It is coming to iPhone this fall, free to start, and there is a waitlist.

The ideas that never work as well as they look

Some popular ideas have a physical reason they disappoint, worth knowing before you spend an evening on one.

• Sparkler writing. It needs a long exposure and a still camera. Hand-held gives a bright squiggle and a blurred person. Brace the phone, use the Live Photo long exposure conversion, and accept that the writing comes out backwards unless you write in reverse.
• Jumping in front of a sunset. If the sky is correctly exposed you are a silhouette, and if you are correctly exposed the sky is white. Choose one deliberately rather than hoping for both.
• Portrait mode on hair, glasses or a wine glass. The depth mask fails at fine edges and at transparency. Use real distance from the background instead.
• Anything at 0.5x with a person in it. The ultra-wide stretches whatever sits in the outer fifth of the frame, which is usually an arm, a hip or a leg.