- Welcome to my second episode on my series
on Mobile Photography for Beginners.
In this episode, we're gonna do a complete walk through
of the iOS Camera App on the iPhone 12 Mini.
Let's roll the intro.
(wind whooshing) (water flowing)
I'm Loic Alford, and let's get started right away
by opening the Camera app.
The quickest way to open the camera
from wherever you are inside of the phone
is to use your menu from the top,
so slide down from the top,
and then access on the camera icon right here.
It's gonna open your main camera facing backwards
and if possible, always use that one.
If you wanna use your front facing camera,
you can use the option at the bottom right corner,
right here to turn around the camera.
But it's always better to use the back camera,
because again, I get better image quality from it.
If you wanna change between different lenses
of the back camera on your iPhone,
you can click on the little one times icon here.
And it switch between the wide angle
and the normal camera here, and if you ever took a photo,
it's gonna switch between that one, too.
If you wanna zoom in,
you can simply long press this a little option,
and then you can zoom and get exactly the zoom you want.
So either wider or more zoomed in,
if you wanna zoom inside of your shot,
I suggest you don't do it directly on the phone
and the way to do it afterwards in post-processing
by cropping the shot
because you're gonna get better image quality
when doing that.
The next option is one
that most people don't really understand is
that when you click on the image,
it's gonna set the focus and the exposure automatically
based on the place where you click.
So if you click on one part of the image,
it's gonna make sure that part is perfectly sharp,
so that's what his focus.
It is also gonna set the exposure
and the exposure is basically, how bright or how dark
that part of the image is.
It's automatically choose the best settings
to make sure they can see it well.
If you wanna lock that thing,
so you don't want it to change all the time
when you're turning around the phone,
because each time you turn around the phone,
you have to click again.
You can actually click on that part of the image
and then long press, and you're gonna have an option
that's gonna say AE/AF lock is on.
So now even if you turn around,
it's still gonna be using that exposure.
To remove this mode, simply click again on the square
and you're back on the auto mode,
but now if you turn again,
you're gonna have to change it each time
you wanna change your focus or change the exposure.
Now let's look at some of the menu options.
So if you come at the top here and we click
on the little icon here,
we're gonna have more options that are gonna appear
at the bottom of this screen.
So first of all, we have our flash option.
So it's better to leave it off most of the times,
because if you put it on,
I think that the results coming from a cell phone
and there's flash on a cell phone,
usually don't look very natural.
So I just prefer living it off all the time.
Then if you look at live photos,
I also leave this one off because it takes
a little three-second video before
and after taking the shot,
but it takes so much space and most of the times,
especially when taking landscape photos or things like that,
it's not very useful in the end.
It's different if you have a pet or if you have children
and things like that,
and reliving these small memories can be useful,
but for most people, it's just not worth it.
Then you have your aspect ratio.
So you should leave it to the default,
which is 4:3, but if you change it to square or 16:9,
and you come back and decide afterwards
that you took your shot, you wanna reframe it,
Apple actually saved the full file,
whatever you choose here.
So you can go back without loosing any quality
if you need to, so that's a pretty good, cool thing to know.
The next option here is exposure.
So if you wanna make your image darker or brighter,
that's where you can do it.
You can bring it down to make it darker
or bringing up to make it brighter.
Now, if you go back here, the next option is a timer,
which is pretty useful.
If you wanna make sure to take a picture of a group
or something like that.
And finally, the last one here, our looks,
I personally wouldn't use the looks
that are built in right away,
because you're better to do it afterwards in editing.
So now if we come back to our options here,
we're gonna close.
To close the menu, we have a button right here,
we're gonna click again on the little icon at the top,
and then we're gonna move to our next mode.
So the next mode right here is portrait mode.
So if we'll open here and we have a person in front,
so we're gonna move on the selfie camera to have it enabled,
it's gonna detect my face automatically
and track it for us.
And then we can simply take a picture here,
and we're gonna have a nice blur in the background.
What is really important to understand is that the blur
in the background is not natural blur,
it's a blur that's created using AI.
So that's why sometimes it has a hard time with our hairs
or things like that around your subject.
Another pretty important thing to understand
on the iPhone camera is that it's really optimized
for faces and pets, so if you tried taking pictures
of flowers or any things like that,
the portrait mode might not work at all afterwards.
There are also different options here
if you wanna change the type of light that you have.
So you can have a studio light,
you can have a contour light.
So these are all kinds of different lights,
but I prefer just leaving it on natural light
when I'm outside, because that's the type of light
that we already have.
But if you're inside and you're trying to take some pictures
that look a little bit more like if you were in studio,
the other modes can be pretty useful.
And if you move on to the Pano mode,
that's a mode that most people know quite well.
So you can simply click on the button and start taking
the Panorama of what is in front of you.
If we move on to our other slides,
so if we slide down there are more options right here,
we can go back inside of our video mode.
So by default, it's on HD 30 frames per second
and I personally would leave it on that
because that's the quality, that's the best when looking
at the videos on your phone.
But if you're gonna be looking at them on your 4K TV,
you can actually click on the little option
at the top right corner right here and enable 4K mode.
We could also change the frame rate
to get different types of frame rates.
But if you don't know much about video,
just leave it at 1080P, which is HD
and 30 frames per second
and that's gonna be the best settings,
probably for most people.
If you look at the top left corner,
we also have an option to enable or disable the video light.
But again, it's not the best quality of light,
so I usually don't use it that much.
Then if you look at the other options here,
we have slow motion video.
So it is important to understand is that if we have
on the top right corner, 720P 440 frames per second,
720P is even worse quality than 1080P,
so I would not, probably more used that mode as HD,
120 frames per second, which is here,
offer pretty good slow motion,
but in better video quality.
Finally, we have a time lapse mode.
And if you don't know what is time lapse mode,
it's basically everything that is spinning up.
So everything is going much faster.
So this is great if you're walking around,
if you're doing a character
or whatever you're might be doing,
that can be great to really show something
that took a lot of time to film, but in a much faster way.
The next one I wanna talk about is the night mode.
And for this, you want it to be dark outside,
which is not the case right now.
So I'm just simply gonna block it,
to treat the camera in to thinking
it's much darker than it is.
Then if you look at the top left corner here,
we're gonna have an option to select how long
the picture we're taking should be.
So if the longer it is in terms of second,
the more the camera's gonna be stable.
So if you're taking a ten second shot,
you're gonna get better results at night,
but the camera needs to be perfectly steady.
So for this, you should hold it with two hands
and having your arms on your body to get the best results.
If you wanna get the best results, when using this mode,
you definitely need to be using a tripod,
and this is gonna allow you to get even longer exposures
up to 40 seconds and get some pictures of the stars
or things like that.
That can be pretty cool.
Now, the next thing we're gonna look at is actually
the more advanced settings.
And for this, we have to go back to our main menu here,
go inside the settings app,
go down here, find our camera option.
And then we're gonna see that we have a few other options.
So the first one we're gonna look at here is format.
And it's probably better to leave it on most compatible
because Apple has a format
that works great for their products,
but doesn't always work good with people
that have older phones or their computers
that are not Mac computer.
So using on most compatible is gonna make the files
a bit bigger, but easier to read
on different types of devices.
Then we have our recruit options,
which are the same ones that we had in the menu,
right before.
The other ones, I'm not gonna go through all
the options here.
We can just leave most of defaults on
and you're gonna be good,
but one you wanna have on is the grid.
So the grid is really gonna help
when taking pictures and videos.
Now you wanna make sure that the option view outside
the frame is actually off
because if you leave it on,
it's gonna show you something that's a little bit bigger
than what the final image is gonna be.
So by disabling this,
you actually seeing what you're gonna get
in the final results.
All the other options we're gonna leave them on
because they're all the options that are make
the camera smart and make the better decisions
when taking the images.
I hope you enjoyed this little iOS camera walkthrough.
And I wanna say big, thank you to my friend, Gabrielle
for allowing me to use her phone to make this video.
If you did enjoy this video,
please let me know by hitting the like button below
and definitely subscribe to the channel for more content
on mobile photography for beginners.
See you in the next one.
Bye-bye.
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