Master Video, Slo-mo, Live Photo and more
The Camera app on your iPhone has plenty of features to explore
Your iPhone doesn’t just take stills. You can also use it to shoot video clips in up to 4K resolution, ‘live’ photos, slo-mo clips, time-lapses and more. The iPhone 12 models can also shoot video in a High Dynamic Range (HDR) Dolby Vision format. This new 10-bit format enables you to capture clips with a wider contrast range and more detail and colour than you’ll see in the 8-bit SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) clips captured by older iPhone models.
To activate HDR, go to Settings > Camera and tap on Record Video. Toggle on the HDR Video (High Efficiency) option. Choose a size such as 1080p HD. When you switch to the Camera app’s Video mode, you’ll see an HD icon at the top left (when shooting in horizontal landscape orientation). Tap on HD to choose a larger 4K resolution. A 4K HDR clip will look amazing on a 4K HDR TV, with more vibrant colours and richer tones. One downside of shooting and viewing HDR clips on your iPhone is a shortened battery life, so take a charger if you’re on a location shoot.
The iPhone provides many ways to swap from recording video to stills and vice versa, so you won’t miss a thing! While filming video footage, you can snap a photo by tapping on the white circle next to the red video record icon. The act of taking the photo won’t interrupt the flow of your footage. In Photo mode you
can drag the shutter button right (or up if you’re holding the phone horizontally) to quickly record video footage. Another quick way to record video while using the Camera app is by pressing and holding the Volume Down button.
When shooting action photos it can be a challenge to capture the perfect moment. In Photo mode, hold your finger down on the shutter icon and slide left if holding the iPhone vertically, or down if shooting horizontally. You’ll hear multiple shutter clicks and see a counter indicating the burst of consecutive stills that you’ve captured. You can also capture a burst by pressing the Volume
Up button if you go to Settings > Camera and toggle on Use Volume Up for Burst. After capturing a burst of shots, go to the Photos app and you’ll see a thumbnail with a Burst label. The amount of shots in the burst appears in brackets. Tap Select at the bottom of the screen and swipe through the images. Tap to tick the best shots then tap Done to keep your favourites while deleting the rest. One thing to note is that Burst mode won’t save still images in the Apple ProRAW format, they’ll just be JPG format files.
When shooting video, your iPhone captures 25, 30 or 60 frames per second (fps) and then plays them back at the same rate at which they were recorded. This reproduces movement at a normal speed. Your iPhone’s time-lapse mode causes the camera to capture a series
of frames at wider intervals. As there’s a gap of time between each captured frame, the action plays back at a much faster speed in the resulting time-lapse clip. Time-lapse is an effective way to record the ebb and flow of traffic at a junction, but a tripod is essential for this kind of footage as any camera movement will be exaggerated. In the Camera app swipe to time-lapse mode and tap the Record button. To capture a 20-second long time-lapse clip you’ll need to leave the iPhone recording for 10 minutes. At this record duration it will capture one frame every second and play them back at 30fps.
Your iPhone’s camera app also offers a hybrid between still and video thanks to the Live Photo option. A Live Photo captures a three-second video snapshot of your subject. In Photo mode, tap the Live Photo icon (top left in horizontal orientation/top right in vertical). A LIVE label will appear. Tap the shutter button to snap the Live Photo. To see and hear the moving Live Photo, hold down your finger on the image in the Photos app.
As Live Photos are a series of still frames you can do more with them using the Photos app. For example, if your subject has their eyes closed, tap Edit, then the Live Photo icon and scrub to a frame where they have their eyes open. Tap Make Key Photo. You can even use Live Photos to add DSLR-style, longexposure motion blur (see p27).