The iPhone is a great camera device: it has great hardware, smart software, and is super easy to use for your grandmother. Like any camera, it has limitations, but you can fix most of them by shooting smart. Here are ten of my favorite tips to help you along the way.
1.Use iPhone Camera Shortcuts
There are a lot of great third-party camera apps out there, but if you want a quick shot of your little cousin’s cuteness or the rare look of a house cat, you’ll need Speed by your side – if you might not be able to get it you’ll have to unlock yours device, find your app, tap the icon, and wait for it to load.
However, by swiping up on the iPhone camera shortcut from the lock screen, you can quickly take that photo without a lot of waiting time. You can do something similar in apps or on the home screen by swiping up from the bottom of the screen to launch Control Center, then tapping the camera button.
2. Try third-party apps
If you’re not in a hurry to take a quick shot, I recommend downloading some of the available third-party manual camera apps. Apple has opened up a range of controls to developers, including shutter speed, ISO, white balance and exposure, meaning you can often take sharper photos than the default camera app.
Additional tip: While you can’t assign camera shortcut buttons to third-party apps, you can place those apps in the Dock for easy access from any part of your home screen.
3.Orient your shooting mode around the end result
Apple’s default camera app offers several different photo modes, including panorama, square, and photo. This may seem like common sense guidance, but I find it really helpful to shoot in the mode you plan to post – for example, when I take a photo I want to post to Instagram, I shoot in square mode, not in photo mode Shoot and then crop the image. It helps you compose your shots better, rather than trying to invent new ones after the fact.
4.follow the rule of thirds
Your iPhone has a grid option available that helps you arrange your photos so they follow the rule of thirds. You can turn this option on by visiting Settings > Photos & Camera and enabling the Grid switch.
I prefer to keep it on all the time so it acts as a secondary and reminder, but you can always turn it off by going back to the Photos & Camera preferences screen.
5. turn off your flash
The iPhone flash in recent generations has improved a lot over its predecessors, but at the end of the day, the flash is still just an LED light: it’s not as powerful, and even with TrueTone technology, it occasionally emits odd tints your photo.
Instead, try shooting in natural light, or if you’re shooting at night, use the camera app’s exposure slider to enhance the light in the photo. If you don’t mind carrying some extra gear with you, I also recommend Photojojo’s Pocket Spotlight, which emits a lot more light than the iPhone’s tiny flash.
6. Use Burst Mode for Action Shots
Chasing a bunch of kids? Taking a bumpy ride? Trying sports photography? In any case, burst mode (available on iPhone 5s and later) may be just what you want to capture the best images. Apple originally included a burst mode for taking sharp photos of moving subjects, but I’ve found that it also works well when your camera is moving – by taking images in quick succession, you’re more likely to get sharp photos, and You have more options to choose from.
To shoot in burst mode, just tap and hold the shutter button (or volume up button) when you want to start. When you hold down the shutter button, you’ll see a counter appear at the bottom of the screen to let you know how many photos you’ve taken. To stop shooting, just lift your finger and the burst will be saved to your camera roll.
7.Turn on HDR Auto
Your iPhone is equipped with a software feature called High Dynamic Range or HDR: This allows you to take photos that might have high-contrast light sources (for example, a bright sunset against a darkening mountain), and still beautiful images can be captured without distorting the light or dark areas of the picture. Your iPhone does this by taking multiple photos in quick succession at different exposures and then merging them together to create a unified image.
You can manually turn HDR on or off from the Camera app, but I prefer iOS 8’s HDR Auto (for iPhone 5s and later) – when you point the device at a subject, it uses information from the iPhone’s sensor to determine when to capture an image may require HDR correction before turning on HDR mode. (You’ll know that HDR is enabled by the little yellow “HDR” box that appears at the bottom of the screen.) This saves a little extra storage space on your device and prevents you from shooting in HDR unnecessarily.
8. Press and hold a point on the viewfinder to lock focus
Locking focus on the current subject is useful if you’re trying to take macro photography or want to prevent your iPhone’s camera from trying to capture other subjects in the frame.
You can do this by tapping and holding on the subject until you see the yellow AE/AF lock alert. This means the AE metering and AF metering are locked on your subject; to remove the locks, simply tap anywhere else on the frame.
9. Slide the exposure meter to lighten (or darken) the image
If your preferred image is overly exaggerated or underexposed, you can fix it by adjusting the yellow exposure slider next to the focus square before taking the photo.
Just tap once on the focus square and exposure slider, then use the sun icon to swipe up to increase exposure, or swipe down to decrease exposure.
10. Use the volume keys to take pictures
Because the iPhone is so thin, tapping the digital shutter button can cause camera shake and blur the photo you’re trying to take. Instead, you can use the volume up button in the Camera app to take a photo — and avoid camera shake entirely.
