The iPhone Photography Book

01

Chapter One

iPhone Camera Essentials

Getting Great iPhone Photos Starts Here

Well, technically, it doesn’t start right here—it starts on the next page because this page . . . well . . . let’s just say it’s not the most informative in the book because, as I mentioned in the book’s intro (on page xvii to be precise), these chapter openers are merely a mental break for the reader (that’s you) and have little (or, in most cases, nothing) to do with what’s actually in the forthcoming chapter. That’s why I gave that warning up front that if you’re one of those stuffy, serious types, you should avoid these chapter openers altogether because they will not offer you the intended mental break. Instead, they will slowly chip away at your soul. So, if you’re one of those folks, consider this a backup warning in case you missed the original back in the intro. The Achilles’ heel of this whole mental break concept happens here, in this first chapter opener, as you’ve yet to reach a page that offers anything to consider (photography-wise anyway), so you’re far from needing a mental break at this point. Oh, sure, the If You Don’t Read This, Your iPhone May Explode page and those that followed may have given you legitimate second thoughts about buying this book in the first place, but hardly enough to where you’d need a mental break, which puts us in kind of a quandary. Why do we (you, me, them. Them?) need this chapter opening spread at all? This isn’t like the old days when authors needed to hit a certain page count so the book would sell. The price of paper has skyrocketed in the past few years, and my publisher would be thrilled if I left these two opening pages out altogether. So, why do I insist that they remain? There’s an important reason, a quite personal one actually, yet it’s one I’ve never revealed before, but if you must know it’s because . . .

How to Focus on an iPhone

When you aim your iPhone’s camera at something, it will focus on what it thinks you want to be in focus. But, it doesn’t always pick the right thing and, sometimes, you wind up with what we call soft photos—they’re not super-blurry, but they’re not super-sharp either. One way to nail that sharp focus every time is to tap your finger onscreen, right over what you want in focus. When you do this, a thin yellow focus square appears onscreen (as seen above) to let you know the area where you tapped is now where it’s going to focus, so you can go ahead and take your shot knowing whatever you tapped on will be in nice, sharp focus.

The Focus and Recompose Trick

When you tap to focus on something in your photo, but then move your camera for a better angle or view, it’s very possible your camera will refocus on something else. That kinda stinks because it’s limiting your creativity—you can’t recompose your shot the way you want because your focus might jump to something else. That’s why you’ll want to know this tip that locks your focus on your subject, so it won’t jump over to something else: simply tap-and-hold on the screen for a second or two, until you see the yellow focus square and AE/AF LOCK appear at the top of the screen. This lets you know your AF (autofocus) is locked (and so is your exposure—your brightness or darkness of the overall image), and now you can recompose and shoot the way you’d like without worrying about your focus moving onto something else.

Holding Your Camera Still Matters

If you want really sharp shots, one thing to keep in mind when you’re shooting is to make sure you’re holding your iPhone still, and the darker it is where you’re shooting, the more keeping it still matters. If it is moving while you’re taking a shot, your chances of winding up with a shot that’s a little blurry (or a lot blurry) go way up. Two tricks we use to keep the iPhone still while we’re shooting are: (1) Tuck your arms in toward your body. This helps stabilize its camera, and it helps more than you’d think. And, (2) if you can lean against anything (a wall, a pole, a column, whatever) or if you can rest your iPhone against anything (a table, a glass, an aardvark, etc.), that will help a bunch, as well. Your iPhone’s camera does have built-in stabilization that’s always on and that definitely helps, but if you can remember to hold it as still as you can while you’re shooting, you’ll wind up with a lot more sharp, in-focus shots.

Keep the Flash on Your iPhone Turned Off

Here’s a pro tip: If you want better-looking shots, just leave your iPhone camera’s built-in flash turned off all the time. Having a flash that is physically located so close to your camera’s lens creates some really unflattering photos, especially of people, where it should only be used to get even with somebody. So, it’s best to just avoid using the flash altogether and either use Night mode (available on newer iPhones; see page 19) or just let the camera automatically expose for the amount of light that is available, even if it’s dark where you’re shooting (it does a surprisingly good job in most cases). This isn’t just a tip for iPhone cameras; pros follow the same rule for their traditional camera’s built-in flash—they avoid it like the plague. If you do have to turn on your flash in some emergency photography situation (hey, it happens), you’ll wind up with a driver’s-license-bureau-quality image, but now at least you know what you’ll get. To turn off the flash, on newer iPhones, tap the upward-facing arrow at the top of the screen to reveal the camera feature icons near the bottom of the screen (right above your shutter button); on older iPhones, they appear at the top of the screen. Tap the flash icon (the lightning bolt) to bring up the flash options, and tap Off.

Using the Self-Timer

DAVE WILLIAMS

If you want to take a group photo (and you want to be in that group photo, too), then you’ll want to use your iPhone’s built-in self-timer. It gives you a few seconds to get in place and pose with the group before it takes the shot. To turn on the self-timer feature, on newer iPhones, tap the upward-facing arrow at the top of the screen to reveal the camera feature icons at the bottom of the screen (right above your shutter button); on older iPhones, they appear at the top of the screen. Tap the icon that looks like a clock (I dunno, maybe it’s a stopwatch icon—you’ll figure it out), and it brings up options for it to wait 3 seconds before it takes the shot (3s) or 10 seconds (10s). Tap the one you want and it’s ready to go. Now when you tap the shutter button, it waits 3 (or 10) seconds and then takes the photo for you automatically. If you’re holding your phone, using the front-facing camera, you’ll see it count down 10-9-8-7, and so on, right onscreen (well, providing you chose the 10-second version). But, if you run over to get posed in the group shot, you can’t see the screen, so instead, you’ll see the camera flash every second, and then right before it takes the shot, it blinks really fast (that’s your cue to smile). When you’re done shooting in self-timer mode, tap the clock icon again, and then tap Off. Note: By default, the self-timer takes shots in Burst mode; see page 15. If you’d rather it didn’t, you can turn this off by shooting in Live Photo (see page 131) or Portrait mode (see page 44).

Don’t Pinch to Zoom While Shooting

There are two types of zoom on your iPhone: good zoom and bad zoom. Good zoom is one that uses the actual lenses on your iPhone (you probably have two or three, depending on your model of iPhone). When it uses an actual lens, that’s called optical zoom and that’s the good zoom (you get to the good zoom by tapping the 2x lens at the bottom of the screen, if your iPhone has it). However, since the iPhone doesn’t have a bunch of long lenses built-in, it allows you to pinch-and-zoom onscreen for sort of a fake zoom. This is called digital zoom, but the other more common name for it is just bad zoom. Bad zoom is using some whacked digital math stuff that apparently they haven’t quite perfected yet to allow you to get closer in on your subject. You wind up with a closer image, but it’s kind of a crappy-looking close-up image that’s somewhat pixelated and soft, and well . . . it just ain’t great (and the more you zoom in like this, the worse it looks). So, we go out of our way to avoid pinch to zoom when we’re shooting—we really only want the zoom that comes from using a zoom lens (good zoom), not digital zoom (bad zoom).

Keeping Your Shots from Being Too Dark/Too Bright

The amount of light in a photo is called the exposure and a proper exposure is one where the light looks normal and balanced. A photo that is too dark is called underexposed and one that’s too bright is called overexposed. Well, when it comes to shooting with your iPhone, it always tries to make a properly exposed image, and it’s pretty darn good at it, but it’s not always right (or it may be right on the money, but for artistic purposes, you want the scene dark and moody, or really bright and cheery). Luckily, you can override what the camera thought was the proper exposure and make it as dark or bright as you’d like using Exposure Compensation. Simply tap on what you want to be in focus in your image (this tells the iPhone to set the exposure using this area) and you’ll see a little sun icon appear beside the yellow focus square. This icon is letting you know you can change the brightness of your photo before you even take it. Just tap-and-drag your finger onscreen upward to make the image brighter or downward to make it darker. If you tap-and-drag your finger to the top of the screen, and you see from the little sun slider that you’ve still got lots of brightness left, you can add more. Just lift your finger off the screen for a moment, then tap-and drag upward again and you can make the scene even brighter (same thing if you want the image darker—just lift your finger and then tap-and-drag downward). If you have an iPhone 11 or newer, you can tap on the upward-facing arrow at the top of the screen to reveal the camera feature icons right above your shutter button. Tap on the Exposure Compensation icon (the circle with the + [plus sign] and – [minus sign]), and then tap-and-drag the slider (seen above) to the left/down to increase the exposure or to the right/up to decrease it. (Note: See page 135 in Chapter 7 for a tip on how you can preserve your exposure setting.)

The Advantage of Shooting in RAW vs. JPEG

Actually, there are benefits to both, and while the iPhone supports RAW images, the iPhone’s Camera app doesn’t let you shoot in RAW, unless you have a 12 Pro, Pro Max or newer (see the next page for shooting in Apple’s ProRAW format with these models). If you don’t have a model that supports shooting in RAW, you have to use the built-in camera in an app like Adobe’s Lightroom Photo Editor (shown above), Photoshop Camera, VSCO, Darkroom, or Snapseed. So, if you’re only going to use Apple’s Camera app, you can read this just for info only. First off, it’s important to note that JPEG images generally look better coming straight out of your iPhone’s camera because they are sharpened, have contrast and noise reduction added, and have other sorts of tweaks all done in-camera automatically to create a great-looking image. When you shoot in RAW, you’re turning off all those things your iPhone does automatically and instead, it’ll just give you a flat, untouched RAW image because you want to add all that stuff yourself. The advantage is you now get to decide how much sharpening, contrast, etc., and in your post-processing app, you can usually do a better job of adding that stuff to suit your taste than your camera does. So, that’s a benefit of RAW. However, its biggest benefit is it captures a wider dynamic range (it captures more data) than you get in a JPEG, so it’s more forgiving if you mess up the exposure and have to fix it in post-processing. You can pull a lot of detail out of a RAW file in post-production—way more than you could from a JPEG. It’s also more forgiving if you mess up the white balance (while you can also change the white balance on JPEGs, it’s just better with RAW images). At it’s core, it’s just a higher-quality original image. However, one big downside is that RAW files are much, much larger in file size compared to JPEGs, so your iPhone’s free space will fill up much faster.

Shooting in Apple’s Own RAW Format