The best camera is the one that you have with you. For many of us, that’s an iPhone. We’ve put together 16 iPhone photography tips so that you can get the best out of your camera and capture beautiful images wherever you are. Some of these tips might require a change to your iPhone photography settings, but plenty of them are just straightforward tips for beginners that you’ll find useful for the rest of your photo-taking life.
1. Keep Your Photos Simple
Identify your subject and ensure that everything in the shot works to enhance that. Too many photos suffer from being cluttered or overly busy, which distracts the audience. It’s much easier to nail your composition with a single subject.
2. Turn on the Grid Lines
A quick alteration to your iPhone photography settings can make all the difference with this tip. Head into Settings and under Camera, turn on the grid lines. This will put a rule of thirds overlay on your scene, which will assist you with composition. Use the vertical lines for strong verticals, such as trees or people, and the horizontal lines to place your horizon or any other lines running across your scene. Aim to put your focal point on one of the four points where the lines intersect for a compelling composition.
3. Use Live Photo for Long Exposure Shots
A neat iPhone photography hack for anyone running iOS 11 or later is to use the Live Photos setting to take long exposure shots of things like waterfalls:
- Turn on Live Photo.
- Set the focal point on the subject of your image
- Tap the screen where the subject appears.
- Hold down until AE/AF Lock appears.
- Frame your shot, making it a little wider than you usually would.
- The process crops a bit, so you need to give yourself a bit more of the scene to play with.
- Hold the camera steady and then press the Shutter button.
- Stay in place for a few seconds.
- When you’ve taken the live photo, open it up in Photos.
- Swipe your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top and you should see some effects options at the bottom, one of which is Long Exposure.
- Select Long Exposure and your camera will convert the live photo sequence into a long exposure.
4. Adjust the Aperture
Head into Portrait mode, and in the top right corner, you will see an ƒ. Tap on this and at the bottom of the screen, you will see a slider that allows you to adjust the aperture. A larger aperture, which has a smaller ƒ-stop number, will give you a shallower depth of field (ƒ/2.2 is a larger aperture than ƒ/5.6; ƒ/2.2 has a shallower depth of field than ƒ/5.6). This shallower depth of field puts less of your scene into sharp focus and gives you more background blur. It’s great for helping your subject to stand out.
5. Hold Your Phone Correctly
Hold your arms squished into your sides to help prevent camera shake. When you are framing a shot, use the grid lines to ensure that doors and walls are straight, not at a slight skew. If you do want to shoot on an angle, do it so that people are certain it’s deliberate and not accidental.
6. Try Different Angles
Altering your angles is a simple but highly effective way to change up your photos. By shooting from a low angle–get down on your knees if you have to–you can make buildings or people look far larger and more imposing than they are. You can add a sense of depth to landscapes by including flowers in the foreground or capturing ripples and waves in water. Shoot from above, and you can give the impression of dominating someone or something. Taking photos from direct overhead works great for food photos.
7. Use Diagonal Alignments
By positioning key elements of your scene diagonally opposite to each other, or by bisecting your frame using diagonal lines, you bring a beautiful sense of balance to your photos. Diagonal balance, compared to symmetry, will make a real difference to the impact of your photo and allow your viewer’s gaze to flow through the scene more naturally. As you train your eye to notice the diagonal alignment of subjects, you will develop interesting balanced compositions and visual harmony.
8. Look for Detail in Close-Up Shots
Get closer! Make sure that you fill your frame with your subject, particularly if you are shooting deliberately close-up shots with lots of detail in them. There’s no point in trying to capture intricate patterns from too far away. Also: move yourself and the camera as close as you can, rather than rely on the zoom facility on your iPhone; the quality will be better. Don’t be afraid to crop afterward.
9. Stage Your Shot
If you’re photographing something that is easy to move, or things in the background are, don’t be afraid to shift them to give yourself the best composition and background. Conversely, if you can’t shift your subject easily, move yourself to try different angles and compositions. And if you need to crop things out, go ahead!
10. Take Multiple Photos
A useful iPhone photography tip for beginners is to always take more than one photo, and try different shooting positions and angles, too. You give yourself the best chance of getting the right shot like this.
11. Get Creative with Your Stance
It’s so easy to shoot photos from chest height that you forget that altering your stance can make a world of difference. Get down low and climb up high and see the difference it makes. You might need to corner yourself to get the most out of your frame. As you look for creative angling, don’t forget that you can flip your phone upside down to get several inches lower for photographing harder-to-reach spots. Before you snap your photo, find the perspective that will create the most interest and capture what you want to show.
12. Use the Camera Timer
The timer is useful for selfies and group portraits, but it’s great for reducing camera shake, too. By using the timer, you give yourself the opportunity to securely hold the iPhone with both hands before the shutter is released. If you’re using a tripod, it helps to prevent any judder from pressing the button. And don’t forget that you can release the shutter using the volume button on an iPhone, too, whether it’s the one on the camera or on your headphones.
13. Use iPhone’s Compass for Tripod Shots
When you set your iPhone on a tripod, you want to make sure your photos are not crooked and the best way to do this is using the compass app to ensure that it will be properly leveled. Can you see the smaller cross or plus sign hovering around the larger one in the center of the compass? Make sure that the small plus sign is perfectly aligned with the vertical line on the compass. You can use that as a spirit level.
14. Keep the Horizon Straight
If the horizon is slightly skewed, it distracts and disturbs your audience because it should be level. Use the gridlines to ensure that you keep the horizon level, or make sure that you deliberately tilt it. This is known as a Dutch tilt.
15. Use Live Photo Loop and Bounce
When you take photos using the iPhone Live Photos facility, you can turn your photos into loops that play round and round, or rock backward and forwards with the bounce effect. You can find both of these where you found the long exposure effect, by opening up a Live Photo and swiping upwards.
16. Play Around with Slo-Mo Video
So this might not fit with the iPhone photography school, but why not have a go at experimenting with slo-mo, or slow-motion, video? When you slide across to slo-mo in the camera app, you can choose between 120 and 240 frames per second in the top right corner and have fun capturing slowed-down video.
There you have it! Take these tips with you as you go outside to take photos with your iPhone on a hike or just an afternoon stroll. Some of these hacks are specifically for iPhone photography, but many of them will transfer to photography with any other camera. The end goal is to help you to capture great photos. Try them out and see the difference that they make. For more inspiration, check out Motion Array’s stock photos section where all submissions are selected for creativity and originality.
