Hello again! I hope you have been well and have been taking care of yourself. As a photographer, I started out taking photos as a fun hobby even before I found the camera in my storage room. The camera just made me a bit serious about it and more invested in it. I used to do this through my parents' phones, which were iPhones mostly. Today, I own an iPhone 13 mini, and it comes in very handy when I just want to click some pictures, as I don't carry my camera around everywhere. Doing this, I learnt a few things on the way. Some familiar and simple, some not.
Adjusting the picture before clicking it is something I discovered recently. Apparently, there is an option for adjusting a lot of features of a picture before you even press click. In the new iPhones, there is an arrow at the top of the screen just below the notch when you open the camera. When pressed, it opens a series of icons below that you can use to adjust the aspect ratio the camera shoots in, exposure, put a timer, put a lighting and colour preset, use live mode and turn the flash on or off.
When I discovered this, I was quite happy as a photographer as now I had more options to work with and had more freedom. There are presets there that I use quite frequently to my needs and aspect ratio adjustment which I think is a very cool option there to have if its your wish to have a 16:9 aspect ratio picture instead of 4:3. Aspect ratios are basically the ratio of a screen's width to height. Rather than being units like pixels, they are just ratios. The presets on there that I use quite frequently are "Rich Contrast" or "warm" amongst many other options because I like the way they look in certain environments and also suit my photography.
A fun feature that I've heard about recently is shooting in RAW mode on iPhones. RAW is a format that you can click pictures in on a camera, which are said to be highly detailed, large in size and provide more features than its alternatives such as JPEG. Apple recently released their own take on RAW format pictures, naming it ProRAW. It is not available on non-pro iPhones and is only available on Pro iPhone models starting from the 12 Pro line-up, so I couldn't try it out unfortunately. But if you do happen to have a model that supports this feature, please do tell me if you have tried it out and what your experience with it is! I'm curious and would like to know.
A simple tip that helped me was turning on the grid on my iPhone. You can easily toggle this feature on in the camera settings. The grid has helped me in the past, and I stopped using it for a while. A noticeable change was the balance in the photos that was a bit lost. The grid sometimes helps lose the crookedness, and helps compose a picture better. There is a concept known as the rule of thirds in photography and it is based off of the grid lines. The lines divide the screen into thirds, where there are certain rules one can follow to adjust their subject and compose a better picture. If you would like to hear more about this and some other rules, feel free to reach out and tell me. I would always be happy to spread information.
Another simple trick that helped me was something I knew a while back. It was using my finger to change the point of focus in a picture. If you have an iPhone, you must have noticed this. You simply click on the object you want to focus on and the phone starts trying its best to focus on that object. An icon appears beside the phone's icon trying to focus, the icon of a sun which you can actually slide up and down with your finger to control the exposure really quickly. It is a simple trick that helps me a lot and is something that I use a lot.
In the end, I do think that iPhones are a great way to get into photography as a beginner if you are not so ready to invest into a camera as well as a lens and other equipment.
If you'd like to see more of this or something similar, feel free to tell me that in the feedback form and I will write another article on it! Thank you so much! My next article, I want to talk about a comparison between two types of cameras, so watch out for that as it will come out on the 1st of October, 2023.
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