PORTRAIT & LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
You can take incredible photos on your iPhone. Here’s how…
PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES are common subjects for a photo, but it can be a challenge to capture decent pictures of these subjects. When we view a snap of a landscape it is often disappointing as it rarely matches 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 narrow 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 artifacts. If a person moves during your pan then parts of their face may become distorted due to the auto stitching process. If you tilt the iPhone during the pan then 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 with the Pano mode.
An effective alternative to shooting in Pano mode is to go back to the Camera app’s Photo mode and tap the chevron (see annotation 2 on page 15) to reveal the aspect ratio controls (annotation 5). By changing 4:3 to 16:9 you can capture a wider shot that better suits the landscape subject. By switching to the ultra–wide (0.5x) lens you’ll capture even
more of the landscape with less distortion than the Pano mode produces.
Classic painters adhered to the Rule of Thirds to produce their landscape– themed masterpieces. If you go to Settings > Camera and toggle on the Grid option in the Composition section then 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 the land in the bottom row. The viewer’s eye is also drawn to areas in the frame where the horizontal and vertical lines of the grid intersect, so try placing a subject in these intersecting areas for a more aesthetic and classical composition. In the inserted image (left) the Rule of Thirds grid helps us center the landmark. The man is offset to the left where two of the horizontal and vertical grid lines intersect. Placing a person in a landscape helps put the viewer in the picture too.
When it comes to capturing an attractive 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 then 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 have snapped the shot.