Tips For Taking Pictures With Your IPhone

The iPhone is a more powerful camera than you know! Capable of any shot, close or far, light or dark, the camera in your pocket easily replaces many professional cameras.

Every piece of technology must be mastered to be fully effective. The same goes for the iPhone camera. I only recently got a professional camera of my own, so I spent years taking photos only with my iPhone, many going on to win photography competitions. But don’t worry, you can do the same! Here are some things you might not know about your camera and some tricks to help you take the best photos.

Setup

What you do before you take the photo is the most important part of taking a good photo! How you setup your camera, the angle you take the photo, the distance from the subject (the thing you are taking a picture of), and the lighting all matter.

The most helpful thing you can do, and honestly the easiest, is to go into your general camera settings and turn on “Grid” and “Level.” The level helps you not hold the phone crooked, and the grid shows the composition of your photo. The grid also allows you to get symmetrical photos as well as utilize the rule of threes, a trick to taking interesting photos. To put it simply, you draw a tic-tac-toe box on your photo, and you want the subject to be in one of the four places where the horizontal and vertical lines cross. The human brain is wired to focus on these areas of a photo the most.

The grid and level help with the composition of the photo. “Composition” can be defined as the artful arrangement and organization of objects within the frame of the photo to create a compelling, visually appealing, and emotionally impactful image. Another way to ensure good composition is to not zoom with your fingers, but with your feet. Zooming in to get the photo limits what you can do and makes the photo more pixelated. Instead, zoom with your feet by moving closer and using another trick called “leading lines.”  A leading line is an imaginary path that leads your eye to different areas of the photo.

You might have heard the term exposure before. Exposure is the amount of light a camera lets into the lens. The more light, the brighter the photo. The less light, the darker the photo. It is important to know how to change exposure on your phone. It is surprisingly very easy. In fact, you probably have done it without even knowing it. You simply click on the main subject of the photo where you want the camera to focus, and then drag the sun icon down to bring down the exposure to darken the photo, or drag the icon up to increase the exposure and the brightness. Making the photo darker can make the photo more cinematic, such as the photo below. Making the photo brighter can emphasize bright objects such as a lightbulb or a sunrise. But be very careful because over-exposing or under-exposing a photo will make it too dark or too washed out, respectively. The key is to find the perfect medium. However, most photos don’t need exposure changes due to the automatic settings of iPhones.

Now you know the basics for taking a photo!

Editing

After you take the photo, you’ll need to edit it. Editing can make a bad photo great or a great photo bad, so be careful you don’t edit the photo so much that it starts to look fake. The editing features in the photos app are alright, but if you want an even better edit, I suggest getting an editing program on your desktop like Lightroom. If you are an Auburn University affiliate, you can access Lightroom and all of Adobe’s other editing programs, including Photoshop, Premier Pro, Illustrator, and more using your Auburn ID to download Creative Cloud. If you aren’t a university affiliate, Lightroom Mobile is free to download in the app store!

Some tricks to editing as a beginner might include changing the contrast to emphasize the light and dark spaces, changing the strength of the highlights (the white areas) or the shadows (the dark areas), changing the saturation or vibrance to emphasize the colors of the photo, or changing the warmth (the orange or blue tint) of the image.  Personally, I learned how to edit just by moving the dots on every line until I liked what I saw more than the original or “raw” photo. Now I know exactly what I need to do to the photo right after I take it. You will too; it just takes time to understand what each dial does.

Now you know the basics of taking photos on your iPhone! Whether it looks like taking photos of your friends at football games or of flowers along your way to class, with a little practice, your photos will be picture perfect.

Be Well, Auburn.