Portrait and landscape photography
You can take incredible vista photos on your iPhone. Here’s how…
Portraits and landscapes are common subjects, but it can be a challenge to capture these shots well. When look at a snap of a landscape, it rarely lives up to our memory of the scene. This can be because our peripheral vision takes in a wider field of view than the iPhone’s lens, especially in a 4:3 shaped photo.
To capture more of a landscape, you can set the Camera app to the Pano shooting mode. This enables you to pan the iPhone left to right (or right to left by tapping the arrow icon) to include more of the landscape. As you pan, the Camera app stitches the video feed together to produce a wider panoramic image. However, the hit-and-miss Pano mode can lead to some ugly artefacts. If a person moves during your pan, parts of their face may become distorted due to the autostitching process. If you tilt the iPhone during the pan, you may get jagged black blocks of missing detail at the top and bottom of the frame. The straight lines of a building can also appear curved when shot in Pano mode.
Alternatively, go to the Camera app’s Photo mode and tap the chevron (see number 2 on ‘Camera app options’ on p21) to reveal aspect ratio controls. By changing 4:3 to 16:9, you get a wider shot. And by switching to the Ultra Wide (0.5x) lens, you’ll capture more of the landscape with less distortion than the Pano mode produces.
Classic painters adhered to the Rule of Thirds to produce landscapethemed masterpieces. If you go to
Settings > Camera, and toggle on the Grid option in the Composition section, a Rule of Thirds grid will be overlaid on your Camera app’s display. The grid’s nine horizontal and vertical boxes help you arrange a more considered composition. For example, you could use the grid to help you place sky in the top row, sea in the middle and land in the bottom. The viewer’s eye is also drawn to areas in the frame where the horizontal and vertical lines of the grid intersect; try placing a subject in these intersecting areas for a more aesthetic and classical composition. In our example image (left), the Rule of Thirds grid helps us centre the landmark. The man is offset to the left where the grid lines intersect. Placing a person in a landscape helps put the viewer in the picture too.
When it comes to capturing a portrait, DSLR cameras enable you to manually open up the aperture to a wide f-stop setting such as f2.6. This creates a background blur (or bokeh) that removes distractions and helps the eye focus on the subject. If you shoot close to your subject using the Telephoto lens, you’ll capture a natural bokeh in Photo mode. The Portrait mode uses a depth map to digitally blur the background with the added bonus that you can change the strength of the blur after you’ve snapped the shot.