10 Hidden iPhone Camera Tips To Help You Take Better Photos

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at some hidden iPhone camera tips.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to some great supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content.

So we use the iPhone camera all the time. But there are lots of little hidden tricks that you could use to take better photos. When taking a scenic photo with an object in the foreground you may have heard of the rule of thirds. That is to put the object one-third of the way from the left or the right and top and bottom of the photo. Not to center it exactly. Now what really helps you with this is using grids. You can turn grids on by going to Settings, Camera and then switching on Grid. With that on you're going to see this grid that will easily allow you to set something at one-third. You just put it in one of the crosshairs there and take the photo and you'll know that you have that object one-third of the way over from one edge or the top or the bottom. So you can try it in different areas there and get a better photo than if you just took the photo with the object right in the center.

Now having Grids turned on also gives you a level. So if you point your iPhone straight down you're going to see a white and a yellow crosshair and you want to line those up as closely as you can to you know that you're pointing straight down at something.

You can take a long exposure shot with your iPhone. You could even do it while holding the phone with your hand. You don't need a tripod or anything like that. What you need to do is turn Live Photos on. So checkout the Live Photos icon and make sure you switch that on. Now take a live photo. You get a photo and a few seconds of video as well. The video is actually recording the changes from frame to frame from the photo. So now when you go into Edit you can scroll up. When you scroll up you'll see the Live Photo's effects and one of them is Long Exposure. Select that and when you do it's going to take all the frames and combine them there and hold things steady. So even though your hand was shaking a little bit it's still going to have the steady parts of the photo being steady and the moving parts, like in this case the water, showing movement. It works great for waterfalls and things like that. It's an interesting effect for waves but probably the best use of long exposure.

HDR or high dynamic range allows you to take photos that have some dark areas and some light areas and it combines them to create a great photo. But it's on by default and you may not want to have it on in all situations. If you ever want to turn HDR off you can do that here in Settings. Now once you've turned it off it doesn't mean that it's not available at all. You just need to swipe to the left or  up depending upon the orientation of the phone to get the extra controls. Once you get those extra controls you can switch to turn HDR on and off manually.

Now you probably know that you can apply filters to photos after you take the photo. But you can actually do it before you take the photo. You just need to bring up those same extra tools by sliding over a little bit there and then you can tap the Filters button. Select a filter and then you'll be viewing the scene with that filter applied. Just because you took that photo with that filter on doesn't mean that you can't switch it later. You can back into Editing and switch to any filter you want or original to get rid of the filter. 

The iPhone 11Pro and 11Pro Max have the ultra wide angle lens. You can use the .5 magnification to switch to that lens. But even if you forget to do it you may still be able to go back and grab that image later on. The iPhone is going to take an additional photo with the ultra wide angle lens and then when you go to Edit the photo you'll see the additional data as kind of this fuzzy color around the image. Now you can actually go to Cropping tools and zoom out and get back the data that you lost by taking it with the standard wide angle lens and not the ultra wide angle lens. The data is only kept on the iPhone and only for a limited time so it's something that you can use to Undo the mistake right away but can't count on having that data later on.

Now if you like taking photos that are non-standard sizes, so instead of 4x3 say a square 1x1, you can swipe to the left to  bring up additional tools and then tap the ratio there. Then switch to 1x1 or 16x9. 1x1 could be useful taking pictures online or if you just like that ratio. 16x9 is very useful if you plan on using the photo in a video later on. However do note that you're not actually getting anymore data. As a matter of fact you're cropping data out of your photo. So you may want to consider just taking a 4x3 photo all the time and then cropping it later on if you want a different ratio.

You can also use a Timer which is useful for getting in your own shot. So bring up the Tools and then tap the Timer button. Then you can set it to 3 seconds or 10 seconds. Then it will countdown on the screen but you also see the flash light blink so you could see it while you're standing there. Take your photo. Using this for Live Photos allows you to have leeway so you can adjust the photo later on if it didn't take the perfect shot you have a few seconds on either side to adjust. The 3 second timer is useful for taking selfies so then you can extend your arm completely without having to worry about tapping the button.

Your iPhone will automatically figure out focus and exposure based on what it sees. But you can set it to something more specific by tapping on a part of the image. It will use that for focus and exposure. Then you can adjust a little bit more by swiping up and down on the little sun icon there to adjust the exposure. You can also fix the focus and exposure by double tapping on a part of the image that you see. Then you can move the camera around and it will stick with that focus and exposure even though you're changing what you're pointing at. So you can fix the focus on an image that won't be at the center of the screen.

Here's one last tip. Now you may know that taking a Pano is great for taking a wide image and it's pretty easy to do. But what a lot of people don't know is you can also use a Pano vertically. So here is a horizontal one. But if I simply turn my phone and I want to get more vertically you can take a Pano going up or going down. Just tap on the arrow to change direction. This can make some very difficult shots easy to get.