The iPhone has the reputation for taking great pictures, despite its relatively low pixel count compared to other smartphones. If you’ve got the new iPhone 6S or any other version, here are five tips from babyphotography.ie test that will help you make instant improvements to your photos.
Auto HDR and Keeping the Normal Photo
The iPhone’s Auto HDR function does a terrific job of controlling highlight areas, such as skies, and keeping detail in parts of the picture that might otherwise get blown out. It can produce unnatural-looking outlines around out of focus objects, though, so go into the iPhone’s ‘Photos & Camera’ settings, scroll to the bottom and check the ‘Keep Normal Photo’ in the HDR section. That way, you’ll always have a regular non-HDR version to fall back on which is important when shooting little ones.
Tap to Focus
To set the focus and exposure for a particular part of the scene, just tap on the screen. It’s so quick to do that it almost becomes second nature, and this gives you the kind of control that you expect in a proper camera. That’s not all – once you’ve tapped an area, you can drag up and down on the screen to apply exposure compensation. This is a big deal if you are shooting babies, as their sensitive skin can have a lot of reflection that can mess with the autofocus.
Square is Good
The Square mode might seem like a pointless novelty that makes it hard to compose interesting shots and wastes pixels, but stick with it. Square shots have a very different ‘retro’ feel, they can force you into thinking more carefully about composition and their shape suits the square thumbnails used by many image browsing tools. Best of all, you don’t have to turn the phone to shoot horizontal pictures – iPhones are much easier to hold upright. When you’re shooting squirmy little ones, this can be a big help.
Shutter Release
You can use the iPhone’s volume buttons as a shutter release when you’re using the Camera app, but you have to press fairly hard and this can loosen your grip and jog the camera. The on-screen button is easier to use and less likely to cause camera shake.
Slo-mo magic
The iPhone 6S can also shoot standard HD video at an amazing 240 frames per second – this plays back perfectly smoothly, but 8x slower than normal. The clever part is that the iPhone plays back the start and end of the clip at normal speed and switches to slo-mo for the bits in between. This not only gives a very professional-looking effect, it means the edits are much easier later on if you decide to go that route.
Finally, make sure you get a sturdy waterproof case for the phone, as its inevitable that baby will find it one day, and while chew marks are cute, a broken phone may not be.
