HOW TO

Take perfect puddlegram photos

Tap to learn how bad weather can be good news for your images.

Grey skies and rainy days aren’t traditionally a photographer’s friend. But while you might not enjoy the rain, each of those droplets brings with it exciting photographic possibilities – especially when they pool together.

Offering new ways to elevate your photos, capturing reflections from a puddle – also known as a puddlegram – can transform everyday snaps into eye-catching shareable shots. Here’s how.

Address your angles

Capturing perfect puddlegrams is all about perspective, with the angle you adopt dramatically altering the image you get. So, it’s time to get low.

As well as crouching to improve your angle, turning your iPhone upside down to get the camera closer to the puddle can help you generate a better, more engaging shot. Try using your iPhone’s volume down button on the side of the handset to trigger the camera, if that helps.

Try turning your iPhone upside down to give your shots a new, dramatic perspective.

With the perfect perspective picked, it’s time to capture your ideal image. Here, using ProCamera can help. By letting you lock separate focal and exposure points, the app helps keep your reflected object perfectly crisp while ensuring the diluted tones of the murky puddle don’t cause you to lose colour and brightness elsewhere.

Make the most of the natural light

By their very nature, you’re going to be taking puddlegrams after a prolonged period of rain. That means you’ll usually be treated to a newly refreshed blue sky or some nice dramatic clouds. Whatever the weather, your editing technique can help enhance what’s on offer.

Using Enlight Photofox, carefully upping your image’s contrast and making subtle brightness tweaks before tapping the shutter button can help you upgrade sunny skies. If you’re dealing with clouds or a flat grey expanse, reducing the brightness and contrast can bring out the sky’s dramatic undertones.

Whatever you’re dealing with, using Enlight’s Structure tool you can bring out detail in your reflected image while erasing the effect from the rest of your image to create a striking, natural balance.

Alter brightness and contrast to fit with the current weather situation.

Turn things upside down

Your puddlegram might be ready for social media, but if you want to quickly transform it from a clever photo into an attention-grabbing work of art, removing the ground can yield dramatic results.

Invert your images to transform reflections into interesting new shots.

By cropping in on your reflection and flipping everything 180-degrees, you can create an artistic look at the world: an image that demands closer inspection and which is practically guaranteed to bring the Likes, Loves and Thumbs Ups. To do this, within the Photos app select your desired image and tap Edit in the top right corner of the screen. Here you can pull the gridlines in to crop your shot and use the rotate button to invert the world.

Crop out the ground and you’ll give your shot an other-worldly look.

All that remains is to share and await the praise of your peers.