11 effective tips on how to take cool photos on iPhone

Indian photographer Siddarta Joshi travels the world and takes fascinating pictures of everything he sees on his iPhone. With the capabilities of modern smartphones, each of us can take high-quality professional-level pictures without needing a separate camera.

Have you always wondered how travel bloggers specializing in photography manage to make such great shots? In this post, we have collected for you 11 tips from a professional photographer — these are very simple tricks that allow you to fully reveal the functionality of your iPhone's camera. Use these tips and take the same colorful and vivid pictures in travel and in life.

Source: The Wanderer

1. Take objects into focus

This will help bring the colors to the foreground and fix them well. Portrait mode on the iPhone X, 8 Plus and 7 Plus adds a depth effect, allowing you to sharply focus the subject against a pleasantly blurred background. This technique can also be used on food and on natural landscapes. And now that portrait mode is also available on the iPhone X front camera, you can take high-quality selfies with it.

After shooting the frame, go to the editing section — there you can choose studio, contour or mono-stage highlighting. These effects will allow you to highlight the face if it is in shadow, or give the picture drama, giving the impression that the portrait is illuminated in the dark.

2. Shoot in slow-mo

One of the best uses of slow motion video is at the Holi Festival in India. Splashes of water and bright colored powder are perfectly captured using this function.

3. Use multi-shooting

Another good trick to help capture the best shots is the multi—shooting mode, in which the camera takes up to 10 frames per second. Allows you to be guaranteed to catch a few clean and crisp frames and choose the best one. It is great when you want to shoot some "action" on the camera or when there is just a lot going on in front of the lens at one moment.

4. Experiment with the angle

Don't get hung up on one level of shooting — try shooting from new angles: bend over, lie down on the ground. The small size of mobile devices has the advantage of flexibility. Reflections in puddles and a variety of small shadows and reflections are especially good — with a smartphone you can get close to any object from a variety of angles.

5. Shoot blindly

Sometimes the most dramatic shots come out of the pictures in poorly illuminated places. On smartphones, there are difficulties with this — a well-identified, but shaky image may turn out. However, the optical stabilization system on the iPhone copes well with blurring the frame with insufficient light, even if you are holding the phone in your hands when shooting.

6. Never zoom

The rule of every self—respecting amateur photographer is "never zoom": do not use magnification even at gunpoint. When you use the zoom function by stretching the image with your fingers, it is only a digital zoom, and it always spoils the quality very much. Fortunately, if you need a close-up, the iPhone X, 8 Plus and 7 Plus have a double optical zoom, which will not spoil the picture.

7. Keep the camera clean

Do not forget to regularly wipe the dust and remove dry drops from the lens. Many people just don't think about it, but the external camera on your smartphone also gets dusty, which is why it starts to smudge the pictures and makes you think that the quality of the camera for some strange reasons began to deteriorate over time.

8. Take photos in RAW

The camera of your smartphone automatically converts images to JPEG format for storage in the gallery. However, all cameras initially work in RAW format during frame production. This format captures all image data from the sensor, so it is many times superior to JPEG in brightness, level of detail and image detection. Unfortunately, it is impossible to use a native smartphone camera in RAW format, but there is more than one application for this — the most popular of them are Snapseed, Lightroom and ProCamera.

9. Catch the light

Use natural lighting coming from objects on the street, from lanterns and from windows. Make sure that the subject is always well lit. You can even have an additional light source with you, such as a flashlight on your friend's smartphone. It is also worth preparing in advance to have time to take a picture by the right hour — for example, against sunrise.

10. Manual control

Forget about the basic settings, set them manually — try to lower the sensitivity to light and take a couple of pictures at a long shutter speed. This way you will be able to find your own unique tone of photography and even develop your own original style.

11. Two hands

If possible, try to hold the phone with both hands — this way you will not wash away the focus. You can also shoot using the volume control buttons, so it's easier to keep the balance. For maximum fixation of the picture, you can set a short timer to have time to align the frame.