Note: This is the second part of a two-part guide. Read Part 1 of our guide to great iPhone pictures here.
Getting the best out of the iPhone camera takes more than simply pointing and shooting. Here are (more) hints and tips on how to take great pictures with your iPhone.
Forget about zooming
- Perhaps the biggest weakness of iPhone (and all smartphone) cameras is their lack of optical zoom (unlike point-and-shoot cameras they don’t have an extendable lens that helps you take pictures of things in the distance).
- The iPhone does have a digital zoom function. Here’s a nice description of optical and digital zoom and how they differ.
- Our advice is to use digital zoom sparingly – image quality decreases the more you use it.
- There are companies that sell optical zoom attachments for iPhones – surely anyone buying and carrying one around might as well just take a point-and-shoot camera instead.
Master exposure
- As we mentioned in the flash section of this blog, light is all-important in photography. Often when you compose an image that has both very light and very dark parts (otherwise known as high contrast), your iPhone will only be able to capture one of the two. But there is a workaround that can help with this issue.
- The solution is called High Dynamic Range photography, or HDR for short. Here’s a helpful HDR tutorial.
- HDR is essentially all about capturing the detail in the image on both ends of the spectrum, both very bright and very dark.
- There are many apps out there with an HDR function. While some simply tweak one image, we recommend one that takes two photographs (one focused on the bright part, one on the dark portion) and morphs them together. We think Pro HDR’s great for this.
- HDR doesn’t really work with moving subjects, so it’s used on scenery or stationary objects.
If you’ve got any hint and tips for taking better pictures with an iPhone we’d love to hear them. Tweet us or comment below.
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