Taking Photos on a Night Out That You Will Actually Keep

Take fewer photos, take them early, and make sure you are in some of them. The ones you keep are almost always from the first two hours, in decent light, with everybody's face visible. The forty second video of a dark room with a light in it has never been watched twice.

You do not need a better phone for this. You need to take roughly a tenth as many photos and put the effort into the three or four that are worth having.

The First Two Hours Are the Good Ones

Light is most of it, and you have the most light at the start. Getting ready, on the train, walking in, the first drink. That is when everyone looks like themselves and the pictures come out sharp. An afternoon start helps here, because at Dreamworx you arrive in daylight and the walking-in photos come out without you doing anything.

Later on it is dark, everyone is moving and the phone is guessing. Take your photos while it is still easy, then put it away and get on with the day.

What It's Worth

Nothing extra in equipment terms. This is one of the few things where the gear genuinely does not matter and the habits do all the work.

If you are going to spend anything, spend it on the two things that stop you losing what you took:

• A small power bank. A dead phone at half nine costs you every photo after that, and your way home as well.
• Enough storage, or a backup that runs on its own, so a lost phone is not a lost day.

Both are cheap, and both are the difference between having the photos and having had them. A better camera is not on the list.

Take Three Photos, Not Three Hundred

Decide in advance what you want and get it early:

• Everyone together, before anybody has wandered off.
• One of you and whoever you came with.
• One wide one of the room, taken from somewhere high if you can get there.

Get those three and you have covered the day. Everything after is a bonus, and the odds of a good one go up enormously once you stop taking one every four minutes.

Point at Faces, Not at Lights

A phone exposes for the brightest thing it can see. Point it at a lighting rig and everyone in front of that rig turns into a silhouette.

Turn round instead. Put the lights behind you and the faces in front of you, and tap on someone's face on the screen before you take it so the phone knows what it is supposed to be looking at.

Get closer, too. Almost every bad night out photo was taken from too far away, and cropping in afterwards does not put the detail back.

Stop Filming the Room

Nobody watches the videos. Not you, not the group chat, not the person who was stood next to you at the time. The sound is unusable and the picture is a blur with a bass line under it.

If something is genuinely happening, film ten seconds and stop. Ten seconds occasionally gets watched. Two minutes never does.

And while you are filming you are not in it. That is the real cost, and it is a lot bigger than the storage.

Get In the Photo Yourself

If you are always the one taking them, you will come home with an album of everybody else. Hand the phone over. Ask early, while whoever you ask can still hold it steady.

Tell them what you want: all of us, from the waist up, with the light on our faces. Then look at it and take one more. Two takes is the entire trick, and nobody has ever minded being asked.

Ask a Stranger Properly

Someone will always do it. Make it easy for them. Have the camera already open, say the one thing you want, and stand still while they take it.

Bar staff and door staff get asked constantly and are usually good at it. So is anybody who has just asked you to take one of them.

Sort Them the Next Day

Give it ten minutes on the Sunday, while you still remember what order things happened in. Delete the near-duplicates, keep the best of each moment, and put the six good ones somewhere they will not vanish into a camera roll of nine thousand.

Then send them. A shared album, or just the six into the group chat, on the Sunday rather than the following Thursday. Sent the next day they get properly looked at. Sent a week later they get a thumbs up and nothing else.