You probably know this already, but the camera built into your iphone is pretty
incredible, and combined with built-in software, it allows pretty much anyone,
regardless of their photography skills, to take some pretty amazing photos. It is, frankly,
an amazing tool, but like all tools, there’s a difference between ‘using’ your phone camera,
and getting the most out of it. So in this video, I’m going to share with you 10 tips and settings
to help you get more from the iPhone camera app. Stick with me until the end of this video,
I reckon there are a couple of tips in here that most people won’t be aware of.
OK, let’s get into it.
There’s a concept in photography known as the rule of thirds. The idea is that,
if you take a subject, and position it dead centre in your frame, that’s quite a boring composition.
The rule of thirds encourages you to break your frame up into nine equal parts, and then position
your subject in the left or right, top or bottom third of the frame. The empty space in the frame
will help draw your eye to the subject of the photo, and create a much better composed shot.
Now, you could apply this rule freehand, so to speak, just look at the frame and figure
out where the thirds would be, there’s nothing wrong with that. But your iPhone
camera does have a grid setting, and it makes composition like this much easier.
To access it, head to Settings, then Camera, then toggle on Grid. You’ve
now got an on-screen grid of thirds, and it will apply regardless of the aspect ratio you choose,
so whether you use 4 by 3, or whether you switch to square,
or 16 by 9, the grid will show and will amend itself accordingly.
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OK so, we all know that if you tap the shutter button, you’ll take a photo.
But did you know that if you press and hold the shutter button, you’ll begin recording a video?
If you swipe over to the right when doing this, you ‘lock’ the video recording mode in,
and you can take your finger off of the shutter button, and the video will continue recording.
But if you swipe to the left and hold it there instead, you’ll see this little counter begin
counting up where the shutter button is. That’s burst mode kicking in, and you can use this
function to quickly snap lots of frames in rapid succession. Great for sport, or capturing action
photos of your fast moving kids or pets, or even just taking a bunch of photos of your friends
or family so that you’ve got a better chance of getting one where everyone has their eyes open.
When you’ve taken your burst pictures, head to the Camera Roll, and you’ll see at the top
of the picture it will say ‘burst’, and then the number of photos included in the burst.
Down at the bottom here, you can see ‘Select’. This allows you to scroll
through the pictures in the Burst, and select any that you might want to keep,
you just tap the select button down at the bottom right and choose Done.
Live photos are a bit of a ‘love them or hate them’ feature, but if you’re a fan of them,
you might not be aware of the option you have to choose a ‘key photo’ as part of your live photo.
To do this, head to a live photo in your library.
If I tap and hold on the screen, the live photo will play, as you’d expect.
If I tap the Edit button, you can see down here next to the cancel button we’ve got a live photo
button. If I tap on that, you can see that you can use your finger to move around the frames
of the photo, and when you find one that you like, you can tap the Make Key Photo button.
This doesn’t change the overall Live Photo, it’s still the same picture, but it will change the
photo that you see as a preview when you’re swiping through images in your photo roll,
so you can of course pick the frame that you think best represents your picture.
Your iPhone will by default focus on what it believes you’d like to focus on,
and it’s using some pretty advanced AI to do this. For example, if I put this camera lens on my desk,
and position my iPhone so that the camera lens is taking up much of the space in the frame,
the camera will focus on the lens. This creates what’s known as a depth of field effect,
where something at the front of the frame is in focus, but the background is not,
creating bokeh, or that nice blurry background that you see in professional photography.
Portrait mode on your iPhone also uses AI to try and help you achieve this look.
But, you can override this if you wish, and tell the iPhone what you’d like to focus on,
and you would do that by tapping on the background of the frame while you’re lining up your shot, to
let your iPhone know that you’d like it to focus on something other than what’s in the foreground.
You can see that the lens is now out of focus, while the background is in focus.
Now, this is obviously not the most exciting shot in the world,
but you could absolutely experiment when you’re out and about with this, transforming what
might otherwise be a pretty bland image into something much more interesting.
Your camera app uses auto exposure to determine how exposed a photo should be,
in other words, how much light the camera should be allowing in for your shot.
I’ve found that in general, the iPhone will typically over expose rather than under expose,
which makes sense, consumers in general prefer vibrant, bright shots rather than dull ones.
But, if you’d like a bit more control of the exposure of your shot, perhaps if you’re shooting
with a bright light source that’s distorting your image a little, you can manually control it.
There are multiple ways to access these controls.
When you tap on the screen when taking a photo, this square will appear,
that’s your focus control, but then if you swipe up and down on the sun icon to the right of that,
you can manually increase or decrease the exposure of your shot, making it lighter or darker.
You can also access the additional camera controls, and tap on the plus/minus button,
which will also allow you to access your exposure controls. In fact, in this method,
you can be a bit more granular, helping you to choose an exact setting that works for you.
Light is ultimately one of the most important factors in photography,
and so having more control over it is going to help you achieve much more professional results.
Have you gone to take a picture with your iPhone of something on your table, and noticed a little
crosshair icon appear on your screen? Be honest, if you’ve ever taken an Instagram
picture of your dinner, you’ve definitely seen this. That’s actually a tool to help
you ensure that you’re positioning your camera perfectly horizontally when taking the photo,
therefore generating a perfect top-down image. Naturally, when you hold the phone facing down,
you’ll probably think you’ve got it perfectly horizontal when in fact you haven’t,
so this can actually be super helpful, and it’s very easy to use. Just tilt the phone
until the white and yellow cross hairs line up perfectly. Once they do, you’ve got a perfectly
horizontal phone, and the shot that you take will also be perfectly horizontal.
This function is currently only available on the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, but if you own one of
these phones you have the ability to take macro photographs. The way the camera works by default,
is if you move close to a particular subject, the macro lens will kick in automatically,
and will switch off again when you pull back out. But, you might prefer a bit more control
over when the macro function should switch on or off, rather than your phone deciding for you.
To do this, head to Settings, then Camera, and ensure that Macro Control has been switched on.
Now, when you move the camera close to a subject, you’ll see this little flower icon appear on the
screen. Tapping that will enter macro mode, and tapping it again will toggle macro mode off.
An annoying habit of the camera app is to reset each time you open it, defaulting to certain
settings. If you’ve spent time configuring the camera app the way that you like it,
or for example if you’re recording in video a lot, but the camera app keeps defaulting to photo mode
each time you open it, it can be super annoying. There’s a way to easily fix this though.
Head to Settings, then head to the Camera, then tap on Preserve Settings. In here, you can choose
to preserve various settings, in other words, retain the same settings as last time, each
time you open the camera app. So if you toggle on Camera Mode, and have the camera shooting in
video, when you reopen the app it will be in video mode, just as you left it. You can do this for a
bunch of different settings, creative controls for things like filters, aspect ratios, macro control,
exposure adjustment, all things which can really help speed up your overall workflow,
helping you to capture exactly what you want each time, without having to mess around with settings.
OK so we mentioned live photos earlier and how they’re a bit of a love them or hate them feature,
but there is quite a cool function of Live photos that I think many people won’t know about.
You see, once you’ve taken a live photo, if you then head into your photo library, you can see
up here in the top left that it’s a live photo. If you tap on that, you’ve got some options. You’ve
got Loop, which will, like it says, loop the video of the live photo and just keep endlessly
playing whatever you’ve captured, essentially creating a short looped video. You’ve got Bounce,
which is essentially a Boomerang feature. But the one I wanted to show you was long exposure.
This is kind of like the effect you get when you set your shutter speed on your camera to really
slow, while there’s movement happening in your frame, allowing you to capture a kind of wavy,
dreamy effect. It works really well with water or spot lighting, and you’re going to want to
hold your phone as still as possible when you capture the live photo, a tripod would be your
best friend here, but give it a go, you can take some really cool photos using this mode.
This one might sound super obvious, because it is, but I hadn’t thought of this until I
read about someone else doing it. Your iPhone has a panoramic photo mode, which allows you to
capture shots of impressive landscapes by panning from left to right, your iPhone will then stitch
together your panoramic photo. But you can also use it to capture particularly tall photos.
To do this, you’re going to have to hold your phone in horizontal mode,
and then pan the phone upwards up slowly, just like you would left to right for a landscape,
but it does work, and whilst I guess this will only be particularly useful
if you live near tall buildings or something similar, it can create a pretty cool effect.
So there you go, 10 tips to help you get more from the iPhone camera app. What about you, what iPhone
photography tips would you have included in this list? Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.