Samsung Water Reflections Photography: Settings and Fixes

Reflection photos commonly fail in one of a few ways: choppy water (too windy), too small/dark or focus on a leaf floating on the water instead of the reflected building. All of these problems can be identified from your phone’s screen and corrected before you leave the water’s edge.

Settings by kind of water

Samsung’s Pro mode guide states that when you choose a shutter speed, ISO has to be set too, and your exposure is the result of those two settings. So the Pro entries show you ISO and shutter speed, and the exposure result.

The mirror breaks up into ripples

Wind ruins reflections. Even a slight breeze ripples the surface so reflections appear streaky, and a fast shutter speed just records the ripples more sharply!

• Try shooting in sheltered bays or small ponds, which calm down quicker than open areas.
• Time your visit according to the wind forecast and look out for lulls between gusts, keeping your phone ready to take advantage of the moment the water is flat.
• If you’re photographing puddles, allow a minute after raindrops or footsteps to let the surface settle.
• If the water refuses to calm down, try making the most of it using a slow shutter speed (1 to 2 seconds in Pro mode with your phone on a tripod) at dusk to blur the ripples and smooth out the reflections.

The reflection is too small

The height above the surface makes all the difference. Standing above the surface of the water, you would see only a narrow strip of reflection. Lower the lens to a few centimetres above the surface and suddenly you see the entire scene reflected in the water.

1. 1

   Hold the phone upside down

   Flip your phone around and get as close to the water as you dare. The rear camera on Galaxy phones is near the top, so this should put the lens at the bottom edge, close to the water. Rotate the image in post if needed.

2. 2

   Use the ultra-wide for puddles

   Try zooming all the way out to 0.6x. A few centimetres above a tiny puddle should be enough to make it look like a lake.

3. 3

   Use the volume key to shoot

   Use Samsung’s Shooting methods setting to let the volume buttons take pictures if you don’t fancy contorting yourself to reach the touchscreen while holding your phone at ground level.

4. 4

   Keep the phone dry

   Keep your Galaxy camera phone just above the surface, instead of lowering it in the water. Apart from the fact that Samsung’s S26 guide warns the touchscreen might not respond in water, chances are there’s plenty of grit and oil in the water anyway.

The reflection is darker than the sky

Still water doesn’t reflect all the light that hits it, so the mirrored sky comes out darker than the real one. On recent flagships, Galaxy Photo mode will default to using HDR, which will help even things out a bit. If you use Pro mode (which only takes one picture and doesn’t use HDR), you’re on your own!

Expose for the sky. The sky will blow out before anything else, so tap the sky (or the brightest part of the photo) and drag the brightness down about 0.3 stops. You can always bring up the exposure of the reflection in post using a brush tool. If your phone supports Expert RAW (S-series flagships and foldables), use that to give yourself maximum latitude in post.

Focus lands on the wrong thing

A reflection is focused at the distance of the reflected object, which can be far beyond the water. But if there’s a ripple or stone or leaf in the way, autofocus might well latch onto that and leave the image you’re after nicely out of focus.

• Tap on what you want to be in focus (e.g. if photographing a reflection in a puddle, tap on the reflection/building etc so that the camera recognises the further away distance).
• Touch and hold to lock focus and exposure (according to Samsung’s S26 guide, this setting will remain locked even after you take a photo, so it’s handy if you’re taking a series of shots). The AE/AF lock guide shows you how to separate the two.
• If using Pro mode, slide focus towards the far end for further away objects (especially handy when shooting reflections), and zoom in to check focus on your test shot.
• Work out what the focal point of your shot is (e.g. if there’s a leaf floating on a reflective puddle, do you want the leaf or the reflection to be in focus?). You can’t get both in focus up close, so choose!

Glare hides the reflection

On a bright day glare on water can overpower the reflection you're trying to capture, though sometimes you want to cut the reflection to see stones under the surface. Nikon’s guide to filters explains that a circular polariser filter helps to minimise reflections from surfaces like water and glass, and the same effect can be achieved by holding a circular polariser in front of your phone’s camera. You can rotate the filter slowly whilst looking at your phone’s screen to see how the effect strengthens or disappears.

You can also control reflections by changing your angle, where the flatter your angle the more you’ll see reflections and the steeper your angle (looking more downwards) the more likely you are to be able to see objects below the surface.

Which Galaxy lens suits which water

• For lakes and rivers, opt for the 1x (default) camera as it has the biggest camera sensor to help in lower light conditions around dawn/dusk.
• Looking to isolate the reflection of a building or a tree from the bank? Use the 3x telephoto cameras found on the Galaxy S24/S25/S26 or the 5x cameras found on the Galaxy S24 Ultra/S25 Ultra/S26 Ultra. Models without a telephoto camera (Galaxy A and Z Flip) can always crop in using the main camera.
• 0.6x ultra-wide cameras (available on all current Galaxy phones) can be helpful if you’re standing close by to capture small puddles and want them to appear bigger.

Editing a reflection

Open the image in Gallery, and tap the pencil icon to access Samsung’s editing tools. Use crop and rotate to make sure the waterline is level, as a sloping horizon line sticks out like a sore thumb in shots like this! Alternatively, activate the composition guide in the Camera app’s settings menu, so you can make sure your shot is level before you take it.

In free Snapseed, use Brush to increase the exposure of the reflection and Selective to tone down the sky’s brightness. Don’t be tempted to follow the Erase reflections prompt Gallery may offer, since it’s the point of the shot! A perfectly symmetrical composition would have the waterline running right through the middle of the frame, but see the symmetry guide for when not to do this.

This guide pairs well with the sunrise guide, since calm water is more likely early in the day. For puddles in the rain, see the bad-weather guide, and for wet sand at low tide, the beach guide.