HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR IPHONE CAMERA FEATURES
1. SWIPE TO OPEN
This one some of you may know already. This can be crucial when taking action shots or capturing unexpected moments. The time it takes to open the regular way by entering your passcode you may have missed the shot. Touch the home button to “wake up” your phone. Then grab the “camera grabber” icon at the very bottom and slide it up. It will open directly to your camera (skipping the verification step). On my iPhone 7 doing this brings me to another screen where I have an option to choose the camera icon in the bottom right corner. If you are shooting home decor (like I am) this one isn’t a game changer. For spontaneous captures and all sports/action photography this really is vital.
2. TAP FOCUS & SET EXPOSURE
Here’s the biggie! To manually tell your camera where to focus tap the screen. How did I not know this?? This is very important. By tapping the screen and telling your camera where to focus you can control what is in focus (which will be what you care about). Now that you have set where to focus you can also adjust the exposure manually by sliding your finger up or down on the screen.
3. LOCK FOCUS AND EXPOSURE
Let’s go deeper into your iphone camera features. Now you’ve spent some time setting the focus and exposure. But as soon as you take that one photo those settings disappear and your camera goes back to no setting. You might want to take 1 or 2 (or 30) more photos of this shot. You do not want to have to repeat this every time. So set your focus and exposure to lock itself. When you tap the photo to begin the process instead of releasing it simply hold it for a couple seconds and the text will appear at the top “AE/AF LOCK”. When you are done, simply tap the screen again to unlock.
4. TAKE HDR PHOTOS
Here is one of the most powerful of your iphone camera features. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Confession: I would see this on my photos from time to time and I had zero idea what it meant…I didn’t even know how it got on there. Yikes! I’m so happy to be enlightened now, and to share this in case you too have been in the dark.
HDR allows you to properly expose your photos so that both the highlights (lighter areas) and the shadows (darker areas) are properly exposed. This is especially helpful when you are taking landscape photos, but it also is sometimes very helpful when you have a room with a lot of light in one area and dark in another area.
Your iPhone will automatically have HDR set to Auto. You can change this to On. At the top of your camera screen is a bar where you have the flash option, HDR, live option, timer option, and filter option. Hit HDR and select ON.
You will want to set your camera to save both the HDR version and non HDR version so you can compare and choose which is best. In your phone go to SETTINGS, then PHOTO & CAMERA, at the bottom under HDR select “Keep Normmal Photo”. Then your phone will save 2 of the same photo. It does a 2 shot burst to capture the best lighting.
5. BURST MODE
5th on the list of powerful iphone camera features is the burst mode. If you are taking home decor photos as I am you will not be as excited about the burst mode as sports photographers are, but it’s still good to be aware of. Burst is very useful for moving subjects. Tap and hold your finger down on the shutter button and you will create a burst of photos, which is a collection of rapid-fire photos. It is great when you are trying to get the timing right…this takes the guess work out of when to push down the shutter.
