Portrait & landscape photography
Discover how to capture perfect portraits and scenic landscapes.
People and pets are common subjects for a photograph, or you may prefer cityscapes or rural landscapes. Whatever your subject preferences, the iPhone packs all the tools and shooting modes you need. Here are some shooting tips and techniques that will help you capture the shot you’re after.
1 Portrait mode
Digital SLR cameras have a Portrait mode that uses a wide aperture setting to create a blurred background (or bokeh). This helps complement the sharply focused subject in the foreground. The iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, X and XR models also boast a Portrait mode that uses software to simulate this background blur effect, but they can only apply blur to portraits of people.
Try shooting a pet and the iPhone says it can’t find a face to work with. Thanks to their extra lenses, the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s Portrait modes can apply a selective blur to any subject, making these models behave more like DSLRs.
2 Adjustable blur
With a DSLR, you’re stuck with the strength of the background blur due to the lens’s aperture setting. A wide blur-inducing aperture has a small f-stop value such as f/1.8. A narrow aperture such as f/16 will produce less blur. On the iPhone, you can use the Photos app to adjust the f-stop to dial in more blur and hide unwanted background objects, or reduce the blur to reveal more of the subject’s original background. This post-production adjustment gives the iPhone more control over the final look of a portrait’s bokeh effect.
3 Perfect panoramas
The Camera app’s Pano mode lets you pan the iPhone to capture a wider field of view in a single image. By default, you need to pan the iPhone left to right to capture a panorama, but if you tap the arrow it will jump to the opposite side of the screen, letting you pan right to left. The Pano mode works best on static landscapes. If there are moving subjects they can be distorted when the panned video is stitched together into a single shot. You can also tilt the camera