How to Improve Your Photo-Taking Skills on an iPhone

We all want our times outdoors to be memorable and pictures help us make those moments shareable. Luckily taking phone pictures is not the most challenging task. Unfortunately, some people still struggle. Let me paint the picture for you, you go on a hike or unique vacation with your friend or family, and they do not know how to take good pictures, so you get home and look through your camera roll to post on social media, and all the pictures you look good in are blurry or crooked. This blog is so you can learn the basics of how to edit pictures and possibly save them, or this can be a lesson for those of you who have a hard time taking iPhone pictures.

To begin, there are some settings you should change if you haven’t already to give you a better quality photo.

Go to Camera Settings> Record Video> 4K at 60 fps

• What this will do is every time you go to record a video, your phone will automatically film at this resolution, which is the best for video.

• Be aware, though, that if you don’t want to take up storage, this setting should only be used on occasion, because the higher the quality, the more space it takes up on your phone. It is a good setting to use if you want a better-quality video every once in a while.

Go to Settings> Camera> Switch Mirror Front Camera

• This one to me is crucial, I don’t know about you, but when I take a selfie and see how it flips the image, I feel like I am looking at a stranger.

• This setting change makes it so that the selfies you take remain in the format you took them in and won’t flip.

Go to Camera Settings> Under composition switch grid view on

• This setting is not needed but it is very helpful, this makes it so you can see the image with lines to straighten it all out.

• Straight and linear images look more professional automatically.

---

Great! Now we have our settings at the best they can be so let’s make our photos as good as possible too.

1. Start by wiping your camera lens, this is self-explanatory, you don’t want fingerprints on the lens because your picture will come out blurry.

2. If you have a subject in the frame, click on them and a box will appear, if the lighting is good then this will help focus the image. However, if the lighting could be improved then next to the box a sun will show up and you can move it up or down to adjust the exposure.

3. Don’t zoom in, just move closer. If you do zoom in it will give your image a fuzzy vibe, if that is the goal, great, but if it can be avoided, even better.

4. Utilize Live Photos, this is great when taking images of moving water or moving images, you can select your favorite frame, change the image to long exposure and REALLY give it a professional feel, or change the image into a boomerang or gif.

1. Utilize Portrait Mode, this is great to give your photo more depth and have a professional feel to it. What is also great about this feature is that you can change the f-stop to adjust the amount of blurring you want happening in the background, just like a professional camera! Something even cooler is that you can change the levels after you finish taking the photos and start editing.

Now you are ready to take some great photos! Align your camera, get lower angles and start shooting! The next blog will be some editing tips.

Ariana Stanton