Your iPhone or iPad has a camera as good as many compact digital cameras on the market. Like any camera, though, it will give you the best results if you know how to get the best from it. Here are our essential tips for better iPhone photography.
There are phones with cameras that boast more megapixels but, as any photographer will tell you, it’s not all about megapixels — your device’s camera has great colour accuracy, sharp optics and negligible shutter lag.
Master the shutter
In iOS 7, Apple has changed the way the camera behaves. In iOS 6 and earlier, when you tap to take a shot, the shutter is actually triggered when you lift your finger off the glass, not when you press down. So when you’ve composed your shot, you can tap and hold the shutter icon, then release only when you’re steady and everyone’s smiling, which also helps reduce the risk of jarring the device as you shoot.
In iOS 7, however, if you tap and hold, the camera will keep taking shots until you release. This will work on any iOS 7 device, but it’s only on an iPhone 5s that you get the much-touted burst mode — 10 shots per second, with the sharpest selected for you and the rest automatically stacked. Continuous shooting on other devices captures two to five shots per second, depending on the device, and these are saved as separate shots in your Camera Roll, which you’ll need to sort through manually. Note that this change in the shutter button behaviour in iOS 7 also means you may now experience a tiny shutter lag when taking a single shot.
Autoexposure has left the horses and carriage in this shot too dark. Tap on them to expose for that area (at right) – but other areas, such as the sky and distant hills, are now blown out.
Lock focus/exposure
We’ve mentioned that you can tap on the screen to set the focus and exposure to suit the area you tap on. (You can’t set the two separately in the Camera app, but other apps such as Camera+ can add this option.) To lock focus and exposure, so that you can recompose the shot without hunting around the settings, tap and hold instead of just tapping: the yellow rectangle will pulse to confirm; in iOS 6, AE/AF Lock also appears when you lift your finger.
With objects at varying distances like this, autofocus might latch onto the wrong area. To lock the focus and exposure where you want, tap and hold on an area until the yellow rectangle pulses.
Clean the lens
Our iPhones spend a lot of time in lint-strewn pockets, and just handling your device can leave it smeared with finger oils which can cause photos to end up looking less than sharp. Before snapping a special moment, take a second to check the lens is clean.
Zoom using your feet
Avoid the zoom on your iOS device — it’s digital, not optical zoom, so all it’s doing is blowing up a small part of your photo before you take it. You might as well shoot at full quality and crop more carefully afterwards. Instead, if at all possible, just get closer to your subject to begin with.
Hold still!
Unless you want arty effects, aim to minimise blurring in your photos. Don’t jab at the shutter icon. Avoid shooting while walking — come to a halt first. Tuck your elbows in against your body; take a deep breath, then exhale gently and steadily as you tap the shutter icon. If you’re shaky or shooting in low light, brace yourself against a solid object such as a tree or wall, or use a tripod. Try attaching a set of earphones with inline controls and using its volume up button as a remote shutter release. You can even trigger a shot wirelessly with the volume up button on some Bluetooth headsets and keyboards.
Watch the horizon
It’s all too easy to take off-kilter shots with your smartphone, especially if you’re shooting from the hip to capture the moment. If you have time to compose the shot, keep an eye on the horizon, and turn the grid on to help you keep things level — in iOS 6, you can tap Options in the Camera app to do this shot by shot; in iOS 7, you have to go to ‘Settings > Photos & Camera’ and switch the Grid on or off, which is a definite backward step. You can level a tilted shot after taking it — open the shot in the Photos app, tap Edit, then tap the crop icon in the bottom-right; zoom in, then twirl two fingers to rotate — but doing this crops off little slivers at the sides, so it’s often a good precaution to leave some space around your subject to allow for this.
Filters
Photo filters are still hugely popular for sprucing up simple shots when sharing online. There are eight built-in filters in iOS (in addition to none), ranging from simple black-and-white in Mono, to high-contrast mono shots with Noir, to analogue effects in Process and Instant. To use the filters, just tap the symbol with three overlapping circles in the corner. You’ll see a live preview of all nine filter options; tap one to see it fullscreen. The three-circle icon will change from mono to colour, to verify that you’re using a filter. Tap as usual to take the shot.
Cleverly, when you take a photo, you’re not stuck with that photo always having that filter applied. Instead, the filter is applied non-destructively to the shot. Review the shot in your Camera Roll, tap Edit, then tap the filters icon, and you can remove the filter effect or even apply a different one.
Panorama
Panorama mode in iOS is simple to use. Select this mode, hold your device upright (in portrait, not landscape) and aim it where you want your panorama to start. In the middle of the screen, you’ll see a big white arrow icon. This tells you which direction to move your device — if you want to take a panorama in the other direction, tap the arrow. To begin, tap the shutter icon, then slowly move your device in the direction of the arrow. Try to keep the arrow on the line in the middle. If you’re moving too fast for good results, you get an alert. When the arrow reaches the end of the box, you’ve reached the maximum panorama size — if you want to stop shooting before this, tap the shutter again. Your device captures lots of images as you move it, and then stitches them together almost instantly. Finished panoramas are stored in your Camera Roll along with your regular photos.
Click on image to zoom in.
HDR
High dynamic range images are created by taking three shots — one at high exposure, one at low exposure, and one in the middle — then combining them to create an image that has more detail than is possible to capture in one shot. The idea is that the results look more like how our eyes see things than cameras do, with much more nuance. Your device’s HDR mode does all this work for you, snapping the exposures it needs and then combining them. This means that taking an HDR photo is slightly slower than a normal photo, but the results can be superb.
A low exposure shot is taken to capture detail in the highlights. Anything in shadow will be too dark to make out, but detail in bright areas and lights will be much more distinct.
A high exposure shot captures the details in the shadows. Any bright areas will be severely blown out, but detail in those areas has already been captured in the low-exposure shot.
The shots are then blended with a midtone exposure shot, so you get maximum possible detail in both the bright and shadowed areas — impossible to capture in a single photo normally.
Finding your way around the iOS 7 camera app
If you’re new to the iPhone or have just upgraded from an old one, this guide will help you familiarise with the camera options in iOS 7.
1. Switch cameras
All current iOS devices have two cameras: an iSight camera on the back, and a more basic FaceTime camera facing the front. To switch between them, tap this camera-switching icon. The rear-facing camera will produce better results, and features such as the flash, HDR mode and Panorama can be used only with the rear camera; the other, as its name suggests, is intended mainly for video chat. Both cameras boast face detection, though, to make sure that people are properly focused and exposed for in your shots.
2. HDR mode
To activate High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode, tap this button. When HDR mode is active, the text here is yellow as an extra visual reminder. When you take an HDR shot, the camera is actually taking three shots in quick succession, which means in effect that it works more slowly and needs extra time to process the image, so make sure you turn it off for when you need to take quick shots. Optionally, you can tap ‘Settings > Photos & Camera’ and set your iPhone to save both an HDR image and the normal (midtone exposure) shot, so you can choose the one you prefer later.
3. Flash
Tap here to bring up the options for the flash on your device. You can choose to have it on Auto mode, where it will fire only if your device detects that it’s too dark to shoot without flash; you can force the flash on, so that it fires every time you take a photo, which can help fill deeply-shadowed areas, particularly in backlit subjects; and you can turn the flash off, so that it won’t fire even if the scene is poorly-lit. The True Tone flash on the iPhone 5s will automatically adjust itself to match the colour temperature of the room you’re shooting in; other iPhone models have just a plain white flash.
4. Compose and focus
Most of the screen space in the Camera app is devoted to letting you see what you’re shooting. Tap anywhere on the screen to set the metering point for the focus and exposure, or if you’re taking a photo of people, you can let the face detection and autofocus do this for you — any faces that have been identified will be highlighted with a yellow box. You can zoom by unpinching on the screen, but this is only a digital zoom, not optical, which means it’s just enlarging an area of the frame and so it will reduce the quality of your photo.
5. Shooting mode
Swipe across the list of camera modes to switch between them. Video mode does what it says; on an iPhone 5s there’s also the option of Slo-Mo video mode, which captures 720p video at 120 frames per second (you can then play back any section at quarter speed). Photo mode is just normal stills shooting. Square mode gives you a square preview and takes square shots, ready for sharing to Instagram and the like. In Panorama mode you move the device smoothly in a line to take a super-wide shot of what’s around you.
6. Filters
If your device supports live camera filters (the iPhone 5/5s/5c and fifth-gen iPod touch do), tap here for the filter options — you’ll be shown a screen of filter thumbnails, with a live view from the camera in each. Tap the one you like to make it fullscreen, so you’ll know exactly how your photo will look with the filter applied. If your device doesn’t support live filters, you can still apply the filter effects in the Photos app afterwards — tap the shot you want, then Edit, then the filters icon.
7. The shutter button
Tap this to take a photo. If you’re in video mode, the button appears red, so it’s easy to see if you’re about to accidentally record video instead of take a quick snap. On the iPhone 5s, tap and hold on the shutter icon to activate burst mode — it will keep taking photos at a rate of 10 per second as long as you hold it down. Do the same on other iOS devices and they’ll also take multiple photos continuously, but they’ll save these as separate shots in your Camera Roll, with no count of how many shots they’ve taken and no auto-selection.
8. Photo Library
Tap here to go to your Camera Roll, where you can review your photos, make basic edits, sort or delete shots, and share via Facebook, Flickr, email and more. If you’ve been shooting in burst mode on an iPhone 5s, this is where you can select the best shot from the many that were taken and delete the rest. If you’ve gone to the Camera app from the Lock screen without unlocking your device, you’ll be able to view and edit the photos and videos you’ve just taken, but not share them or access any others in the Camera Roll.
Shooting shortcuts
Here are a couple of handy shortcuts in the Camera app. First, when you want to get snapping fast, you can jump to the Camera app from the iOS Lock Screen by swiping the camera icon in the bottom-right corner upwards. If you do this you’ll then be able to view and edit any photos or videos you take, but not any others in your Camera Roll until you unlock your device.
Instead of using the on-screen shutter button to take a photo, you can also press the Volume Up button on the side of your device. If you’re using earphones that have inline controls, you can even take a shot by pressing the Volume Up button on the cable.