iPhone Photography - Take Amazing Photos With Just Your Phone

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Quintin bachelor, and this is my iPhone photography course. I've been a professional photographer for years using a traditional expensive camera, but more often or not, I find myself using my iPhone, whether it be a quick snapshot or it's the only thing I have on hand. In time after time, I am blown away with what I can capture with it. Here's a few photos I've taken with nothing but my iPhone. No expensive lenses, no fancy camera apps, just my iPhone. But if you don't have an iPhone, that's totally fine because the majority of the information in this class can be applied to any smartphone. And you need the newest iPhone. Having the most high-end gear is great, but it's all about how you use it rather than what you have. But I have designed this course around the latest ISO. My class has tons of visuals to help you understand concepts or when going through the phone settings or editing a picture. We'll start the class out by a plane, the best settings to our iPhone to take the best possible photos. Next, we'll dive deep into all the elements of composition. I'll show you how to create depth, isolate a subject, find interesting perspectives in your environment, and tell a story, as well as utilizing light to portray any emotion or feeling you want in your. Once you've mastered composition, I'll show you how to best utilize a different modes on your iPhone, like portrait, Night, panel, and live photo. I'll even show you how to take a long exposure photo, capturing some beautiful silky waterfalls, or how to rapid fire burst mode with your iPhone, capturing hundreds of photos in seconds. And finally, to polish off all the photos you've taken throughout this class, I'll show you how to use the amazing free app lightroom in how to edit with it all on just your phone. So we'll be covering everything from settings to composition to actually taking photos, editing them. This class is for anyone who wants to become a skilled photographer but isn't quite ready to break the bank on super expensive camera and lenses. Also, anyone who wants to develop an impressive portfolio or take their Instagram or other social media platforms to the next level. Or anyone just looking for new hobby. Almost everyone has a smartphone and they all take photos with them. So why not make yours and notch above the rest in my class, I guarantee you'll learn lots of tips and tricks and become a much better photographer then you already were, by the end of the class, you will have taken photos that your friends and family won't believe we're taking with just your iPhone. So whenever you're ready, let's get started. 2. Best Camera Settings: Before we can go any further, there's just one thing we need to do before you can start taking awesome photos. On the surface, the iPhone camera can seem pretty simple and straightforward and it is. But what a lot of people don't know is that there are some advanced settings that you can apply to help squeeze every last drop a value you can out of your iPhone and take a few steps closer to a professional camera. With that being said, let's go ahead and open our Settings app and go down into the camera. Once we're here, the first thing we're going to go into, we're going to go ahead and click on formats up at the top. Now, if your camera is already set to the default settings on your iPhone, it's going to be on high efficiency. What we wanna do, we wanna go ahead and switch that to most compatible. There are benefits to both of these options, but we want it on most compatible with high efficiency does, is it makes your file a lot smarter when you take the photo using up less storage in your phone. But the reason we want most compatible is for two reasons. One, it's going to make your photos higher quality. And if you ever end up sending these photos to a friend, they're going to be received a lot easier if they have a different phone other than an iPhone. Not only that, it's going to take your photos in the JPEG format, which is the most popular photo format in the world. Once we've selected most compatible, let's go ahead and go back and go down to the next one, which is reserve settings. Now, in preserve settings, it's going to ask you if when you leave the camera app, do you want the settings, you apply it to your photo taking to stay when you open the app again. So this section is really a personal preference. It's really up to you if you want to keep the settings when you leave the app. Personally, I like to have them all on because it just makes it closer and feel more like a real camera. On a real camera, when you leave the camera or turn it off and you turn it back on, all the settings that you have on that camera will be left on the camera. So I like to try my best to make my iPhone resemble my real camera as much as possible. Next, right below that one is use volume for burst. We're going to go ahead and check that one on as well. What that does is if you hold the volume up button while you are taking photos, it will do a burst mode intake, a ton of photos in the matter of seconds. We'll get into why that's useful later on in this class. But for now we're going to check that on just so we have it to our disposal. Next, let's come on down at two, the composition section of the settings. The first thing that we see at the top is grid. We're going to go ahead and check that on what that does. It's going to add some lines of when you take some photos creating a grid on your live viewing to help you line up horizons or create better composition. It's really useful when you're actually out there in the field. So we're gonna go ahead and check that on. Now in this course, we're not going to really be using the back camera at all or the selfie camera. But just a little tip, mere front camera, if you go ahead and check that on, it is going to make it so your selfies look exactly how they look when you're taking a picture. Sometimes you'll take a picture and when you see it, it'll be mirrored in your face. Looks all weird because, uh, you're not used to seeing it that way. If you go ahead and check that on, it's going to correct it so it doesn't do that in your selfies look normal. Once again, we're not going to be using that, but just a little tip. And then below that we have a view outside the frame. If you have this on, I highly recommend that you turn it off because what it does is when you're taking a zoomed in photo, it shows some of the picture outside of the frame. What that means is it's showing you image that's not going to be in your photo when you take it. And it can sometimes mess with your composition in the vision you have in your head, because there's image in it that you think might show up in your photo, but then when you actually take it, it does not. So go ahead and just leave that off. In the next section that we have photo capture, the top one is prioritized faster shooting. We're going to leave that off for now. I only recommend that you turn that on if you're using the burst mode and want to capture some action. For the most part, we're going to have that off. Finally, we have smart HDR and we'd definitely want this on. What smart HDR does is it blends the best part of separate exposures into a single photo. When you take a photo, you either have to adjust for the shadows or the highlights and sometimes one of them can get blown out. What smart HDR does is when you take a photo, it will take the best values in highlights and shadows from all the different photos and composite into one which it thinks looks the best. So like I said, we definitely want that on. And that's it for the camera settings. Your phone is now ready to go take some amazing photos. Now that we've done what's necessary to make the camera perform at the best of its ability. 3. The iPhone Camera: Now that we've adjusted our settings to take the absolute best possible photos with their iPhone camera. Let's now go into the actual iPhone camera itself in, take a little walk through everything it has to offer. Because just like the settings, it seems pretty simple on the surface, but there are few things that it has the offer that you may not know about. So let's go ahead and open up the camera app. When you open the app, this is what you're going to see over to the right. You can go ahead and tap the shutter button and take a photo. But if we look over here to the left, we have this little icon. If we go ahead and tap that, that will then bring out this entire row of icons that we can use to alter our photos in different ways. At the top of the row, we see a little icon with three overlapping rings. If we tap that, this is going to open up a line of filters that we can apply to our photos to give a different feel or effect to them. Personally, I never use these filters and because there's so much more you can do in After Effects with your photos then what these filters have to offer. But when you have a filter on, you'll see that same icon, but this time it'll be in color legging, you know that there was a filter applied to turn it off, simply tap the icon and swipe down to the bottom and Apply None. Underneath filters, we have the timer. If we tap that, we see that we have the option to choose a 3 second or 10 second timer. Now, this is really helpful if you're taking a long exposure photo and you don't want to shake the camera, or you simply just want to be in your photo. But let's go ahead and select three seconds. Now when we leave the timer and we're taking a photo, you can see up in the top left-hand corner the 3 second icon letting you know that a timer is on. To remove a timer, go back into the icon and tap off. Below that we have our exposure here. We can control how bright or dark we want our photo to be. Another way you can control this is by tapping the screen to focus on a subject, can sliding your finger up or down to adjust the exposure. Next we have the frame size. We have four by three, a square or 16 by 9. I recommend keeping it on four by three or 16 by 9, because if you want, you can always crop down into a square. You can't crop your picture bigger below frame size. We have live photo. Basically keep this turned off all the time because it's a huge nuisance when I'm taking photos in the life photo is turned on when I didn't know. If you by mistake turned on the life photo up in the top left-hand corner, you will see the life photo icon will be yellow, letting you know that it is turned on, to turn it off, simply just tap it and it'll disable life photo. Finally, at the bottom, we have the flash. Now, this is another tool on the iPhone that I don't find myself using too much because the iPhones flashlight is pretty weak and you have to be really close to your subject for really to illuminate whatever you're taking a picture of. Also at times, it can cause discoloration in your photos. So I don't use it too often. But if you do find yourself needing to use a flash, you can just tap on the icon and tap on. Now, the little lightning bolt in the bottom left-hand corner will be yellow, letting you know that the flash is on and simply tap it to turn it off. Now, depending on which iPhone you have, you'll have some choices on different focal lengths. For your phone. You'll have the option to choose between the times one which is the standard focal length. Or you can go down to your wide angle lens. Or you can go up to your telephoto lens, which is times 2. Or you can tap and hold zooming in even further or out, choosing which focal length you want. Now if we swipe down from photo, this is where we can take videos. Also well-taken a video, all of your focal lengths still apply. So if you want to take a video with a really wide angle, you can do that just like taking a photo. We'll tap this red button and we'll start taking a video and you can tap it again to stop the video from here. If we swipe down again, we can see where we can take slow motion videos. And if we swipe down once more, this is where we can take time lapses. This time if we go up from photo, we have the portrait mode. The portrait mode is a really great feature. You're probably going to find yourself using quite a bit. But we're going to dive deeper into this a little bit later on in this class. For now, I'll just say portrait mode really shines best when you have a distinct subject in your frame that the iPhone can isolate in blur out the rest of the background. And finally above that we have the panorama mode. Here we can take those super wide angle long shots. But once again, we're going to dive deeper into this later on in the class. Another thing I want to add, if you're wondering what this icon here at the top right-hand corner is. This is the button to switch to the back facing camera or the selfie camera. But like I said before, we're not going to use this camera because it is substantially worse than the front-facing camera. To view any photos you've just taken it. Just tap the little thumbnail on the bottom right-hand corner and you can then look at all the pictures you just barely took in. That's going to cover it for the iPhone camera. 4. What is Composition?: What is composition? Basically composition is the elements of a photo arranged by you, the photographer to make your photo look more or less interesting. But in this case, I'm going to show you how to make your photos look more interesting. We're going to take a quick dive in the major elements of composition, such as balanced perspective in lighting. My goal is to give you the ability to use any element of composition to compose the image that you have in your head and bring any photo to life. 5. Perspective: The first element that we'll cover is perspective. Perspective is basically the point of view that the viewer is seen when the picture is taken. Now, why is this important? Why focus so much on our perspective? When you're at a national monument or a really famous landmark, most people are going to take this same exact photo standing in the most popular spot, right in front of whatever it is in snapping that photo. To make our pictures more interesting, we want to think outside the box. Most people are seeing things from head level. Now. I know everyone's not the same height but around that area. Everyone's viewing the world from that perspective. So it's our job to find a more interesting and point of view or perspective. Thinking outside of the box, seen things from different angles that people usually don't see things at that angle or perspective. So perspective, we want to think outside the box and come up with new ways to view things. 6. Creating Depth: Next is depth, which is essentially creating more layers to our photo, creating depth and dimension in it. Now, when creating depth, your perspective will also come into play. Choosing your perspective can either add depth or take away depth. And you'll see later on in these few lessons that one element can affect a different one in one way or another. But let's go ahead and take a look at this photo here, which has a good depth. As you can see, there are quite a few layers. We have the foreground here, which is a little blurry. We then have the next layer, which is this water. We have this nice a row of trees in the background with the mountains and sky. As you can see, there are quite a few layers here, making this photo much more interesting to look at. Here's another photo. This one's still a good photo, but it's just not quite as interesting. There's not as many layers. We do have maybe one layer here, but it's not as engaging as the other one. Here's a great example of when it changing my perspective actually added more depth to my photo. By getting lower to the ground, I was able to create an extra layer in the foreground to add a few more layers to this photo. Now you couldn't really say one of these pictures are better than the other. But when thinking about your perspective, creating depth is one of your main goals when choosing it. 7. The Subject: So we've came up with an interesting perspective. We've created some depth, but they're still something that our photo is lacking, which is a subject. Now, lots of times I will have students send me photos which are by all means a great photo, but they're just lacking in some areas. In it's mostly a subject. There's nothing for the viewer to rest their eyes on him look at, which is blatantly the subject in the photo. Here's an example of a photo that is just lacking in subject. There's not a whole lot going on in this photo in the eyes need more to look at by placing a subject in this environment makes this photo at ten times better. But sometimes you can have too much subject. Now what does that mean? What I mean by that is you have too many elements in your photo competing to be the subject. But that doesn't mean you can't have more than one subject. I know it can get a little confusing, but there's a fine line between multiple subjects and too many subjects competing to be the center of attention. In this photo we have two subjects, me in the fox. But the fox is the more dominant subject because it's face is really sharpen in focus and I'm a little bit more blurred out, making it so the viewer's eyes go straight towards the fox first. So even though there are two subjects in this photo, one of them is clearly the more dominant subject. In my opinion, the subject is probably one of the most important elements of photography in composition. If you don't have a subject in your photo, then you don't really have anything much in your photo at all. 8. Leading Lines: Leading lines are a fantastic tool and a way to help your viewer find your subject. Leading lines are lines or shapes in the photo that help direct the viewer's eyes to the subject. The more you take pictures and practice, the easier it will become to find natural leading lines in your environment. But regardless of the name leading lines, the lines you're looking for don't have to be perfectly straight lines. Anything that you can find that helps direct the eyes towards the subject, any type of shape, any sort of jagged line, anything at all will work. In. The more you take photos and look around in the world, the more you will find leading lines everywhere. And you'll be able to use them to your advantage, to isolate your subject even more. 9. Balance & Dead Space: Moving on, we have balanced in dead space. Balanced and dead space, I think are another one that's really important when it comes to taking photos. If you don't have any balance, the photo isn't very nice to look at in a lot of dead space can just make the picture look lost and have no direction. Let me show you what I mean. So when it comes to balance, this frame right now looks pretty balanced. But if I were to move over here next to the bookshelf, now you can see there's a big empty white wall right there and the frame just looks out of place. It doesn't look very balanced anymore. But if I were to move back, now the frame looks a lot more balanced. This applies with the photos you take as well. You want to make sure there's a consistent balance in your photo. Now you can use different elements like lighting, color, contrast, different things like that to balance your photo out, we really want to avoid having a lot of dead space. So if you have a big blue sky up top or a lot of ground in the foreground. We want to crop that out so your picture looks more full and we're getting rid of as much dead space as possible. But here's an example of when I was faced with a very clear in boring sky. But I was able to use parts of the TP, balance out my photo with the sticks from the TP protruding into the sky. It therefore makes this picture very well balanced, even though there are no clouds in the sky. Here we have this dirt road stretching out into this beautiful landscape. On the left we have some bonds and a little house out on the prairie and some mountains off in the background. Now you might think the balance is off because all of the subjects and objects are to the left of the picture. But over to the right we have a lot of deep dark clouds in the sky and a lot of light over by the subjects, therefore balancing out this entire photo. So balance is one of the key things when it comes to making a aesthetically pleasing photo. 10. Light: All right, now light plays a very big role in all of your photos and how they're going to look in turn out, like I said before, I don't recommend using the flash on your iPhone because it's really weak and sometimes it can cause discoloration in your photos. I personally recommend using natural light that you can find out in the world. Now, depending on what time of day you take your photo, the lighting is obviously going to be different. Now in the morning, in the evening, we're going to have golden hour, which is going to make your photos look really warm in the lightings, going to look really nice because it's going to be coming in from the side across the horizon. In the middle of the day, the sun is going to be directly above you, which can create really harsh shadows on people's faces in other subjects. Or if it's the middle of the day and a nice cloudy overcast day that is going to create some really nice optimal lighting. Basically what the clouds do is create a nice filter over the Sun, creating some nice soft ambient lighting, which therefore makes the shadows are really subtle and soft as well. But also don't be afraid to create your own light or find man-made light like in cities and around buildings and other things like that. Bringing a light with you, even just a flashlight can help you create some really interesting photos. 11. Tell a Story: And finally, our ultimate goal when it comes to taking photos is to tell a story. This isn't so much as a element of composition, but we can use all these different elements of composition that we just talked about to portray a story in our photo, making the viewer much more engaged in what's going on in our photo. Here's a really good example of storytelling in a photo. These are some birds I was taking a picture of out over the lake. And as you can see, the pelican was going after the other trying to steal a fish from it. But not all photos have to have a super-complicated or really in-depth story. For example, this photo right here. All the story is, is that there's a road that goes out into a field and there's a house on the side and there's a storm coming over. That's all the story is. Or here's another one. All of the story is that there's a frog on a stick or a leaf. The story doesn't have to be crazy. It just has to be intriguing enough to become a photo. But if you're taking great photos in applying composition, in having a subject story is just going to come along with it. It's not going to be something that you have to force into it. 12. Break the Rules: Now that we've gone over all these elements of composition in gone over these rules that you can follow to create great and interesting composition. What I want you to do now is learn to break these rules. Because at the end of the day, rules are meant to be broken. I know it sounds cheesy, but there is no one saying a photo can't be good because you didn't follow this rule of perspective at the end of the day, they're your photos. And if they look good, then there are good photo, as long as people like looking at them or you like looking at them, they're good photo. Great photographers break these rules all the time. I've seen tons of photos where there's no depth in its amazing photo. I've seen tons of photos where the subject is all over the place or the lighting is crazy. You're the photographer, you're the creator. You have the vision in your mind, in the power to capture whatever you want. Here's a photo that pretty much has no depth at all or super isolated subject, but it's still a great photo. This one has a ton of dead space, but it is still a balanced photo. Here's another one that has a ton of dead space. And you could say that it's not balanced because all of the subject is at the bottom of the photo. But it's still a great photo. When you break these rules of composition, sometimes you turn out with the best and most unexpected photos. So break these rules. It's really important to know these rules so you can break them. 13. Long Exposure: How to take long exposure photos with your iPhone. Now if you don't know what a long exposure photo is, this is what I'm talking about. When you see photos of some nice silky buttery smooth waterfalls and other things like that. I'm going to show you how you can do this with your iPhone. In trust me, it's much easier than you think. But before we can do that, we need to understand how a long exposure photo works. Now with the traditional camera, how it works is the shutter is left open for a long amount of time, causing a blurred effect. Now with the iPhone, it's going to be done similarly, but not exactly like a traditional camera, but we'll get into that later on when we actually are taking our photo. In our case with the iPhone, we're going to be using the live photo mode, which is the only time I ever recommended that you use live photo. But before we start this, there's one thing you're going to need, which is going to be some sort of tripod. You don't need some huge, crazy expensive fancy tripod. Literally this is all I'm going to be using. This little tiny gorilla pod that you can stick a phone on. This was literally like $20 and there are even some cheaper options out there. All you need is some sort of way to stabilize your phone. If you find yourself out and about on the go and you wanna take a picture with the life photo and get a long exposure. You can even just set your phone, prop it up on something. You just want to make sure it is holding still and not moving at all. Unfortunately, you can't just hold your phone with your hand, your photos going to end up blurry and you'll see why. So I've gone out to one of my favorite spots to take photos, can found this perfect area with two beautiful little waterfalls right in front of me. I've already gone ahead and set up my car. Can I have some beautiful clear water here in the foreground, the subject in the middle, and some nice green forest in the background. I decided to stick with my standard focal length. This photo. I found that the wide-angle lens was showing too much of my environment in There's too many things going on. And I found that the zoomed in or the telephoto option was to zeroed in on my subject and not showing enough environment. So I decided to just stick with the standard focal length. And finally, I have my phone setup here on my little tripod, so we're now ready to finally start taking our long exposure photo. Also, I want to apologize in advance for any camera shaking on the phone. I tried my best to prevent it as much as possible, but doing things like this, It's bound to happen. With that being said, let's go ahead and head back into our camera and tap the life photo icon up in the top left-hand corner to enable live photo. Next, let's tap the screen and make sure or subject is in focus and adjust the exposure to our liking. Next, Let's tap on this icon so we can apply a 3 second timer. Planet timer is going to get rid of any camera shaking that could happen when tapping the screen to take a photo, which will help her picture be as sharp as possible. Once we have our subject in focus or exposure set and our timer on, let's go ahead and tap the shutter button. This is then going to give us a 3 second countdown. And because of our timer, in, there you go. Our picture is taken. Once we've taken our live photo, we want to tap this little thumbnail in the bottom right-hand corner to view it. From here we want to tap the bottom of the screen and drag our finger up. This is going to open up a row of effects that we can apply to our live photo. We have the standard live photo, a loop of bounce. But what we want is long exposure at the very end. Once we tap this affect, our photo will automatically be converted into a long exposure photo. And just like that, we have some beautiful new waterfalls. It is really that simple to create. Long exposure photo shoot with just your iPhone. But just a quick recap to take long exposure photo is you're going to need some sort of way to stabilize your phone. The live photo feature to be turned on, a three or 10 second timer to be added, and the long exposure effect to be applied. I hope you've learned a lot in this lesson, and I can't wait to see some of the photos you take with your iPhone. 14. Macro: Macro photography is a genre of photography that specializes in taking photos of really small subjects. Some really popular things that take photos of when it comes to macro photography are things like flowers and insects. But you can take pictures of anything that is small, that has a lot of cool detail like your iPhone example. In this lesson, I'm going to go ahead and show you how to set up your phone to take the best possible macro photos you can. These woods I was in, it didn't end up having a whole lot of flowers in them. So I decided to take a picture of this nice green moss that I found on this rock. But as I started composing my shot, I thought that this picture didn't have enough going on in it and that it was lacking in subject. So I came up with an idea to take my silver ring and place it on top of the rock. I thought that would be a great subject to add to this photo in the green moss would be a really nice environment in color to add to it. There's a lot of details on my ring, so I thought it would be perfect for macro photo. Lots of times when I take macro photos, I like to zoom in with the telephoto lens. The reason I zoom in and don't just move closer to my subject with my camera is because the closer you get with your camera, sometimes the camera can't focus on the subject if it's too close. So zooming in is a great way to get closer to your subject and capture every little detail, especially when you're doing macro photography. Also, the more zoomed in you are to your subject, the more blurry the background is going to be. So when you're doing macro photography, I always recommend that you use the telephoto lens to get a much closer shot. And just like that, I've captured a super cool and interesting macro photo of my ring. After that, I went on to take some more photos of the ring, this time of it on my hand. And I had a lot of fun and capturing a bunch of cool macro slash product photos of this ring. So when it comes to macro photography or any type of photography, don't be afraid to play around and experiment and come up with new interesting perspectives in photos. Any idea you have, you should just go for it and take the photo. I think some of these pictures that I took turned out really cool and I can't wait to edit them. And I can't wait to teach you how to edit your pictures later on in this class. 15. Portrait Mode: All right, it's time to cover everyone's favorite mode to use, which is portrait mode. Now, why do we like portrait mode so much? Well, it gives us those nice buttery, smooth, blurry backgrounds that looks so good in our photos, but the iPhone isn't achieving those blurry background, same way a traditional camera is. The iPhone is simply choosing a subject that it thinks the subject is an isolating it from the background. And then using pretty much a filter to overlay the background and make it look blurry. And the reason why portraits are so good for this mode is because it's really easy to see the difference between a portrait or a person standing there and the background. It's really easy for the phone to isolate that subject. But just because the mode is called portrait mode doesn't mean you have to only use it for portraits if you're taking a picture of any sort of subject and it's really easy to distinguish it from the background. I would try using portrait mode before using the normal mode, because a blurry background is a really good way to make your subject the main focus of the image. But with that being said, let's go ahead and dive into the portrait mode and take a quick look at what it has to offer and some things you may not have known about it. When you enter portrait mode on the iPhone is going to automatically look for a person's face to focus in lock onto. Once it does, it's then going to use computers inside the camera to start blurring out the background. But while we're in portrait mode, we have a new row of icons down at the bottom that are similar to filters. There are different lighting effects that you can apply to your portrait photo. But just like the filters, I don't recommend using any of these because you can achieve the same effect in After Effects, but much better, but the your portraits. So it's really up to you if you want to use them or not. In portrait mode, you're also going to have the option to choose between the standard focal length or a wide angle lens. But I want to introduce you to this new icon that appears in the top right-hand corner when we are in portrait mode. This little f symbol, if we tap it, will bring up this meter. This meter basically controls the depth of our photo, aka how blurry the background is. If we slide our meter to the left, you can see the numbers getting smaller, meaning our background is getting more blurry. And if we slide it to the opposite direction and making the numbers larger, this is going to make our background that less blurry. Even though lots of times you want to get that buttery smooth background that lots of photographers achieve in their photos. I would try to refrain from taking the depth as low as it can go to get a blurry background. Because sometimes the iPhone doesn't do the best job at separating the subject from the background. And it can look a little choppy. I like to keep mine somewhere in the middle to keep it looking more natural. But like I said at the beginning of this lesson, use portrait mode as much as you want because it's one of the best tools that the iPhone camera has to offer. 16. Night Mode: How to use the night mode. When your phone detects that it's in a dark setting, the phone will automatically switch over to night mode. This little icon here will appear in the bottom, letting you know that night mode is on. Once we tap it, it'll bring up this meter. Let us choose between auto off or max. When you take a photo using the night mode, it's going to take a little bit longer photos, similar to a long exposure photo, letting more light into the picture. So once we have night mode on, let's go ahead and tap our subject and make sure it's in focus and adjust our exposure. But I feel named mode is only so helpful to a certain extent. If we turn night mode off and just take a picture with the normal camera, we can pretty much get the same exact looking photo if we adjust our exposure properly. They pretty much look identical. If you're taking a picture of a subject that is already producing a lot of light and a nighttime setting, then having the night mode on isn't really a must have. But since you can put night mode on auto, it doesn't hurt to keep it on because it does work really well when you are in a very, very dark setting. So I recommend just keeping it on auto because it doesn't hurt to have it. But something really great about the night mode on your phone is unlike a long exposure photo. You don't have to have a tripod to be set up and you don't have to be super still. The night mode does a really great job at taking smooth, crispy photos, even if you're walking around with your phone. So it's really nice having that freedom, being able to move quickly in getting shots you want instead of having to set up a whole thing to capture one picture. But I think that's going to cover for night mode. There's not a ton that goes into it. It's really just something in the background and it doesn't hurt to know how it works. But it also makes it really nice that we're not constantly having to adjust it or do things to capture good night photos. 17. Burst Mode: In this lesson that let's quickly go over how to best utilize burst mode on your iPhone to take the best pictures. Now if you remember back in one of the first lessons, we went over the best camera settings to apply to your iPhone, to take the best pictures. In that we set our iPhone to take a rapid fire burst mode if we hold up on the volume button. So if you hold up on the volume button, it's going to take a whole lot of pictures. But if you're going to take a whole lot of pictures, I recommend going back into your settings and imply prioritize faster shooting and you're going to have a much better time. Your phone is going to take the pictures faster and there's going to be less buffering. But make sure you don't get confused with holding up on the volume button and not holding down the bottom one. If you hold the bottom one down, it'll actually start taking a video, which is a really nice feature that they added. But when it comes to using the actual burst mode and taking pictures, taking pictures of things that are fast isn't really necessary to use the burst mode. The iPhone already does a pretty good job at taking pictures of things that are moving quickly in freezing them in time. I personally use the burst mode in situations where I have a subject that is moving, I want to take a series of photos and then go through and choose the best one where they have the best movement in pose. But that's pretty much it when it comes to burst mode, it's pretty fun to use. So go crazy and get creative and take some awesome pictures with it. 18. Pano Mode: Panorama mode. What is a panorama? A panorama is basically a really long photo that you can use as a banner or anything like that. It's just a really long photo. Lots of times it's used if there's a landscape in your lens isn't wide enough, you can use the panorama mode to capture all of it. So basically on the iPhone camera, if you go all the way to the right, there is a panel option. To take a piano. You just want to tap the shutter button and make sure you're holding really still. You can use a tripod which is more ideal, but it's perfectly fine just holding at handheld, you'll still get a perfect panorama. But basically you just want to follow the instructions the iPhone has given you in steadily hold your hand in, move your iPhone from the left to the right, capturing everything you want in your picture. So it's kinda weird how it works. It's kinda like a hybrid between a video and a picture. You're taking a picture and then moving across and it's capturing everything that the iPhone sees. But I will give you a little tip. Taking a piano does not really work when there are moving objects in the frame, especially when you're really close. Soon as you can see, someone is taking a piano and I am in the frame and I'm moving around and I just get warped and look super weird. It's kinda funny, but it just doesn't look good in the pictures. But in this example, I'm taking a panel of this beautiful Canyon in this winding road going down and there are cars moving in the frame, but they aren't affected if the subject or source of movement is far enough away from the camera, it will not cause any warping or streaking in your picture. 19. Edit Your Photos: Okay, let's take a quick look at what the iPhone has to offer when it comes to editing your photos. When you want to edit a photo, simply just tap the screen and the edit option up in the top right-hand corner will appear. So let's go ahead and tap that. And that's going to bring up a row of bars and icons and tools that we can use. Edit our photo. Over to the side. We have these three icons. In. Underneath. These three icons we have multiple tools that we can use to alter our photo. But let's go ahead and just start with the top icon and move our way down. So the first thing we have is the auto or the magic wand. If you tap this, the iPhone is going to automatically apply settings that it thinks makes this photo look the best. From there. If you drag this meter up or down, it will enhance or decrease the effect on the photo. And then if you tap the icon again, it will revert back to normal. Hello that we have our exposure. I recommend trying to get your exposure the way you want it the first time around when you're taking the photo. Because in After Effects, if you try to adjust the exposure, it will make your whites look super blown out and it does not look very good. Little minor adjustments are okay, but try not to go to one side of the meter by an extreme amount. Next we have brilliants. The iPhone isn't very clear on what brilliance is, but it looks like it's just adjusting the darkness and highlights and overall shadows of the image, making it look a lot more punchier and have more contrast or a lot brighter in less dark shadows. Next, let's move down to Highlights. Highlights is going to control how bright your highlights are or how weak they are. Under that we have shadows, which is basically the same thing as highlights. But for shadows, you can control how deep or dark your shadows are, or you can reveal more detail in your shadows by going up. Next we have contrast, just controlling the contrast of your photo. Brightness. Pretty self-explanatory. And black point. This is going to control how deep and dark your blacks are, or if you want them to be a little bit more washed out. Next we have saturation. If you go up, you can make it very saturated. Or if you go all the way down, you can create a black and white photo. Next we have vibrance, which is not the same as saturation. If you go all the way down on this one, you still have some color left in there, but it is very dull. And if you go up, you can make it very vibrant, making those colors really, really pop. Next, we have warmth. This just controls how warm or cold your photo is basically controlling the white balance in the picture. If we go up, we can make our photo look really warm. Or if we go down, it'll add some more blues and cooler tones to the photo. Next we have 10. This is basically like warmth, but we have a purplish red tint or a greener, cooler tint. Up next is sharpness. This just controls how sharp in detailed your photo is. Definition, which is really similar. Adding that extra crispiness to our picture. And noise reduction. If you have a lot of noise in your photo, which is those really grainy colorful particles in your dark photos. You can use this in. It will do its best to remove them. But I recommend not doing it too much because to get rid of them, it just smooths out your photo. And if you pump it all the way up to the top, it'll just make your picture look really smooth and flat and end up looking blurry. Finally, at the bottom of this row we have vignette where you can put a dark shadowy ring around your photo, or you can put a light ring around your photo. Now, another big reason why I recommend not using filters when you're taking a picture is because after you take the photo, you can always go back and put a filter on if you want. Next, we see those same overlapping circles again at where we can apply any filter that we want. So like I said before, do not take pictures with the filters on. You can always apply them later. In finally, we have our cropping tool. You simply just tap and drag with your finger. You can control the crop of your picture. But we have a few other options. First option is that we can control the tilt of our picture. If our horizon line is a little bit crooked, we can use this to correct it and straighten it out. Low. We can warp the y-axis or the x-axis. If we want to distort our picture a little bit up in the top left-hand corner, we have two options. We can either flip or mere our photo or we can rotate it any way we'd like it. Finally up in the top right-hand corner, we have different presets for cropping. If we want to apply any of these to our photo, we have free form where you can drag your finger and create any size crop you would like. You can go back to the original size, or you can apply a square. And then you have all these different options down below it. That's pretty much it when it comes to editing with the iPhone, it gets the job done, but it can be a little limiting in certain ways. But luckily, we have a great alternative coming up in the next lesson. 20. Editing With Lightroom Mobile: If you were familiar with Lightroom, lightroom is an amazing software made by Adobe that you can download on your phone and edit your pictures. Lightroom has so much more to offer than the iPhone in there. So many different things you can do to edit and alter your pictures. Lightroom is so extensive that it would take an entire another class to teach you everything that you can do with Lightroom. So in this lesson, I'm just going to walk you through my process of editing a picture in pointing out major differences in changes when it comes to Lightroom compared to the iPhone. And like I said before, lightroom is a downloadable app you can get from the app store and it's completely free. There will be a few tools locked behind a subscription where you can still create phenomenal edits without them. If you download the app, you might see that your screen, it looks a little bit different from mine, but I'm just using an iPad. So there are some slight changes when it comes to look, but you're going to have every single tool that I have. Nothing is going to be different. I just want you to have the best viewing experience. So with that being said, let's go ahead and jump on in and start editing this picture. When I edit photos, I like to start with the crop. So just like the iPhone, you can tap and drag and choose what you want your crop to be. But let's go ahead and tap on this and it's going to bring it down some different options we can apply. We can do the original, or we can do custom, or it has all of these different options. We can choose between, just like the iPhone. But let's go ahead and go to Custom. And I'm just going to bring the top down a little bit and bring the bottom up a little bit, just cutting out some of that dead space. Now here we have a row of some familiar looking effects that we had on the iPhone. We have light color effect detail. Let's go ahead and tap on light into a tap light, we're going to have some more familiar effects like exposure, contrast and highlights. And I'm going to quickly go through and adjust these so my picture can look the way I want it. But before we do that, I want to point out the auto effect that Lightroom has those. Well, if we tap this auto, Lightroom will show you what it thinks looks the best and I will put some minor adjustments on your photo to help. And we can go ahead and tap back and see the difference. I'm going to leave it off and adjusted myself. So from here I'm going to go ahead and bring the exposure down just a little bit. Up that contrast. Bring the highlights down, bring the shadows up so we can see a little bit more detail in the dark shadows. Make the whites a little bit brighter and make the darks make the blacks a little bit darker. From here, if you go ahead and tap the screen and hold it, you can see the before and after in the effects you've made on your picture. Next, let's move down to color. One thing that Lightroom has that the iPhone doesn't that I think is an amazing tool is color selecting. So we have the basic vibrance and saturation. I'll go ahead and bring my vibrance up a little bit and bring the saturation down. But from here, if we click color mix this little colorful circle right here, we can then change any color we want in our picture and only affect that color. So if we go to the blue, I want to make the blue a little bit more turquoise. I'm going to go all the way to the left so you can see what I'm talking about. If I go all the way, you can see the sky is a lot more turquoise and it only affects the blue color. But I'm just going to bring it over a tiny bit and then bring the saturation down just a smidge. Something also really neat. If you go ahead and just double-tap the cursor, it'll send it back to the middle to 0. Next, let's move into the yellow color and I'm going to make my yellow is a little bit more orange in warmer. Next, I'll go into orange and make my orange a little bit more saturated. Let's go ahead and take a look at our before and after, just to see our progress. Next, under colors we have effect. We have texture, clarity, dehaze, and vignette. So I'm going to make the texture a little bit higher, just so there's some more detail in this picture. Here's another example of how you can do so much more with Lightroom, with the vignette. We can add a vignette, but we can also change the midpoint, the roundness, and how much it feathers out there. So much more you can do with Lightroom and really make the picture you want in your mind. But I'm going to go ahead and double-tap vignette to set it back to normal because I don't really want one in this picture. Now, another really awesome helpful tool I want to point out is this icon right here. If we go ahead and tap that, we can tap this plus sign over to the left and we can choose a paintbrush or a gradient. Now if we tap the paintbrush or we can control the size of it. And then we can drag our finger and pretty much pain out an entire section. I'm gonna go ahead and paint out the sky. Anything in this red highlighted area is going to be changed in nothing else. So now if we go into effects in, we bumped the clarity all the way up. It's only going to affect our sky, making it look a lot more dramatic and darker, giving some nice dark, stormy clouds. This is one of my favorite tools to use in Lightroom and I use it all the time. Another one, if we tap the plus sign again, we can add a gradient and we can drag our finger from the bottom to the top and create highlighted area that's more of a consistent line across. Next, let's go into light and we'll bring our exposure down a little bit, making the foreground look a little bit darker, adding some extra depth. When we lower the exposure, the colors do look a little bit brighter and more saturated. So let's go into color and bring the saturation down a little bit to match the rest of the picture. And that's pretty much it when it comes to editing in Lightroom, that was a quick edit, but that's kind of my process. This picture, I feel like I didn't need a whole lot done to it. And depending on the photo, it will need more time to edit. But this one I think, was pretty good in the first place. But also if you're still interested in filters like the iPhone Lightroom also has some presets that you can apply to your photo. If you go ahead and tap this icon here, it'll bring up a bunch of presets that you can apply. I really like turquoise and read or warm contrast, but there are a bunch that you can choose from if you still want to stick with the filter route, which is totally fine in lastly, if you add a picture and you feel lost or confused and you don't like the direction it's going. If you tap this icon here, you can go back to original and hit apply. And it will start completely over. And that's it. Lightroom can be a little bit confusing at first, but like I said, there's so much that goes into Lightroom that it would take an entire another class to teach you. So keep an eye out for that in the future. But the more you practice it, the more you edit, the better you're going to get. So I recommend downloading the app and just jumping in and starting to experiment with your pictures. 21. Create Your Presets: One more really awesome feature I want to show you that Lightroom has, is how to create your own presets. This photo right here, I've spent quite a bit of time editing it and I think it looks pretty good. But I have a few other pictures that I took of this chipmunk that on edited and I don't want to spend a ton of time editing the same picture again, trying to get it as close as I can to this. So what you can do is if you tap these three dots up in the top right-hand corner and tap Copy Settings. You can then go through and check everything you want to be transferred over to the other picture. So I'm gonna go ahead and check everything and then tap the final check mark up in the top. And once we have our settings copied, we can go over to this picture, tap the same three dots up in the top. And then this time tap Paste Settings. And there you go. All of the settings that we have on the first photo are now all on the second photo. But that's just how to copy and paste your settings. I'm going to show you how to now create a preset. If we tap the same three dots under Paste Settings, we have Create Preset. Here we have the same option to check as many options as we want. I'm going to go ahead and leave tools out because that's kind of like the cropping and I don't want to change the crop of the picture. I don't want to paste that over to every single photo. So we have profile color, light, color effects in detail. So we can go ahead and name our preset. I'm going to go ahead and just name this warning warming. And then we can go ahead and tap Check. Warming was now added to our presets. So if we go and press presets down here at the bottom, we have warming right there and we can apply it to any other photo in the future. So once you start editing some pictures, go ahead and start creating your own presets. It saves you a ton of time when editing, and you can create a really nice library of beautiful edits. 22. Conclusion: Thank you so much for taking my class. I really do hope you've learned a lot of valuable information that you can use to take better photos with your iPhone. And I cannot wait to see what you post in the project gallery. If you haven't already, make sure you finish the class project, all you have to do is take a photo with your iPhone. You can edit it if you want, in post it in the gallery. I cannot wait to see what you captured. But before you go, There's one more thing I want to mention. I've created a Facebook group for all of my photography students called the lens hub. It's a private Facebook group or all my students can share their photos, get feedback and share feedback and get inspiration. It's a group of a bunch of different people just like you on this journey through photography to get better. And I've added this in the last lesson because I only want people in there who are really serious. People who watch this class all the way through. So as a thank you, I want to give you the opportunity to join the lens Hub. Just click on the link in the resources and make sure you enter the password Lightroom that magic. Once you do that, you'll be a member of the group and you can start sharing throughout all my time inexperience of photography, there's been two things that I stand by. The first one is that I believe photography is broken up into thirds. The first third is your gear and how to use it. Not necessarily your gear. Put the more technical side of photography. Do you know what you're doing? You know how to create a blurry background. Having that knowledge is really important to capture what you want. Second is the creative side, creating interesting composition, creating that image or vision you have in your mind and capturing it on a camera. In the final third is editing. Editing is where all the magic happens. You can make the viewer feel any way you want them to feel, depending on how you edit it. Do you want the viewer to feel more cold or warm too long to feel happy when they see your photo. Depending on how you edit your photo, you can portray a different feeling or emotion. So breaking photography down into thirds, technical, the creative and the edit. And the other thing that I stand by is don't let the photos you never took haunt you. And what I mean by that is if you have an idea or photo in your head that you want to take, Just take it just take it really quick. And if it doesn't turn out good, oh, well, because it might be a photo that turns out and looks amazing. But if you don't take it and you think in the back of your head, Oh, it's not going to look good, then you'll never know. So don't let the photos you never take haunt you. Always take the shot. Because it might turn out amazing and be one of the best photos if you've ever taken. Once again, thank you so much for taking my class. If you want to see more of my work, I have all my photos posted on Instagram. You can check me out there. And I hope to see you in future classes.