Vacation Portraits on the iPhone

1. Intro: Do your travel photos look like this? Would you rather they looked like this? Well, guess what? You already have a really powerful camera in your hand, your iPhone. It's pretty smart, but it needs some technical know how and a creative eye for best results. With the iPhone's amazing capabilities and your newfound knowledge, get ready to blow everyone away with your travel photos. In this class, you'll learn about the best camera settings to use, how to pick a great location, how to work with difficult lighting conditions, some tips and tricks, posing your subject, how to edit your photo, and how to keep your memory safe in a photo book. Hi, my name's Beth. I'm a creative professional. I worked for 20 years as a videographer and a graphic designer, and now I'm exploring the world and sharing my knowledge to bring some beauty and global understanding to our collective lives. Your project will be an edited portrait, demonstrating the skills taught in this class, such as composition, posing, creative lighting, and depth of field. Bonus if you can use one of the tricks I'll be teaching you. Gear, you'll need an iPhone, a model, and a creative eye. That's it. The iPhone I'm using does have three lenses on it. It has a regular, a telephoto, and a phish eye. If you don't have all three lenses, you can always buy some clip on lenses. Join me along the Turquoise coast of Turkey, the perfect setting for this class on vacation photography for the iPhone. Are you ready? Come on, let's go. 2. Welcome: Hello, and welcome to the class Vacation Portraits on the iPhone. I'm looking forward to sharing helpful skills so you can capture precious moments of your loved ones. This class will give you the confidence to pose your subject, adapt to challenging lighting conditions, and fine tune your picture using a free app called trim. As a bonus, I'll demonstrate how to create and order a photo book. Cherish your memories forever. No need to worry about future proofing your digital images. Something to keep in mind on your photography journey. Before you click that Shutter button, always think about your final intent. Are you featuring your subject or the landscape your subject is in? Do you wish to emphasize activity or stillness? Do you want a more post style or do you want to capture candid moments? Once you decide these things, you can use various compositions, tricks, poses and lighting to achieve your goal. That's what this class is all about, giving you the tools you need so you can express yourself creatively. 3. Camera Settings: Et's get familiar with the best settings for portraits. Here's how to access camera settings. So you hit settings, you scroll down to your camera app. You're gonna want to click Format. I recommend most compatible, and I recommend turning on Proaw. It's best for editing later. Photo Mode means resolution. I like to do 24 megapixels and turn on the grid. Portrait mode forms the foundation of this class. What is it, and how does it work on the iPhone? Well, it uses computational photography, meaning your iPhone's computing power is mimicking the blur achieved with more professional cameras. Portrait mode uses software to recognize human and animal shapes. It then keeps them intact while blurring the background. The coolest thing about portrait mode is that you can adjust the blur later in the editing process. When in portrait mode, you can choose different lighting effects. Experiment with contour or studio lighting mode. You can fine tune the light level before clicking the shutter button. But don't worry if it's not perfect. You can edit it later. While you're in portrait mode, you can zoom into your subject for some neat background effects. So if you just click this little button here, you'll see there's two times Zoom and five times Zoom. I'm zooming in here two times, but then I need to pull my tripod back a little bit to get the subject back in the frame. The neat thing about the telephoto lens is that it compresses the background. So any object you have in the background like this lighthouse, actually makes it look larger. Live Mode takes a series of photos in quick succession. You click this button up here to turn it on. To select your favorite picture from the series, you click Edit, and then you click down here and you can scrub back and forth until you find your favorite picture, and then you can make it your key photo. Pano is great vertically if you want to capture tall buildings or tall trees. Most people think panorama is just for horizontal pictures, but as you can see, it works for vertical as well. What about horizontal orientation versus vertical? The choice is up to you in the moment. Some backgrounds lend themselves to one or the other. For example, a wide vista would be better in horizontal orientation. If you want to feature your subject more, vertical works well. I usually experiment with both during a shoot. Before you go away on your trip, make sure you tidy up your phone, delete any extra videos or photos you don't need anymore, back everything up, and make sure you have cloud storage. I recommend a minimum of 2 terabytes. So to recap, we learned about camera settings. We learned all about portrait mode, live mode, and what orientation to take your photo. 4. Composition: When I'm on vacation, I'm always on the lookout for a good location for a photo. Chances are slim that you'll be able to return to the same location. Let's say if the light isn't quite right or there are too many people around. So you can either make the location work for you using your new knowledge or simply move along, and I'm sure another location is bound to jump out at you. Here are some things to look for leading lines, which I'll explain in a minute. Foreground elements that you can use to layer your shot, such as flowers or leaves or something similar. You'll want to make sure that the lighting isn't too harsh, so high noon is not great because it does cause shadows. We'll talk about lighting in another lesson. And you want an interesting background. Okay, let's talk about leading lines. You'll see that the bench here on the road form some interesting perspective lines. So take advantage of that. What I'm doing is I'm just lowering my body a little bit here so I can get the lighthouse and the leading lines, and then I'm going to hit the shutter here. Here's another example of some leading lines, and you'll also notice I've turned on the grid, and I've placed my subject in the top right corner. You can use the grid to help you with the rule of thirds. If you place your subject in one of the four intersections, that will help with your composition. It adds visual interest if you can add foreground elements like branches or flowers. You can tap on the screen on the person's face to make sure that they are in focus and not the foreground elements, which sometimes happens. This is always a fun location when you're in a city, if you see a coffee shop or a restaurant, and you can place your subject in the window and go outside, move around, make sure there's no glare on their face, and be mindful of objects in the background and the foreground so they don't interfere with your subject's portrait. Here's a great example of leading lines. You'll see that we've got lots of stuff going on here. The steps for a really interesting perspective leading away from the subject. I really like this photo. It's got sort of a photo journalist feel to it. The sun was setting. We have a really high vista here, so I placed my subject on the steps just to watch the traffic go by. And I hit the shutter just as the scooter was going by, and it blurred the movement. And like with all things in life, once you know the rules, then you can break them. So this is definitely not a rule of thirds photo, but there's some really interesting things going on here. I used the wide angle lens to emphasize the curvature of the amphitheater, and I placed my subject in the middle. As long as you're thoughtful about your decisions, then I believe you'll take successful photos. Experiment. So to recap, we learned about leading lines. We learned about how to position your subject using the rule of thirds, how to incorporate layering and foreground elements, and giving you permission to break the rules now that you know them. 5. Lighting: Lighting and photography is more important than you may realize. Your pictures are only as good as the light you give your camera. The ideal time of day is magic hour, meaning 1 hour after sunrise or 1 hour before sunset. The light is soft and golden at this time of day. Check your favorite weather app for sunrise and sunset times. You may not think bad weather includes a bright sunny day at noon, but it causes harsh shadows and washed out colors. Best to move into the shade if you can. To work with this issue, you can place the sun right behind your subject's head for a neat halo effect. At nighttime, while your camera may compensate for low lighting, you'll still get some grain and you'll have to keep a steady hand for it to do its computational photography job. You could compensate for this by using a fill flash. So to access the flash, you just tap this little arrow here, tap the flash icon, and then hit on. And that forces the flash to stay on. For a dramatic look, have your subject turn sideways to the sunlight for a side lighting effect. You can use white walls to reflect sunlight. For exposure, you can slide this little sun icon up and down to change the exposure. However, if you turn away and come back, it resets. To get around this, click this arrow here and then click on the exposure plus minus button. And now you can slide the exposure compensation up and down, and it will stay set there. Shade the lens with your hand to avoid lens flare and washed out pictures. Sometimes stormy clouds create the best lighting conditions, particularly later in the day before sunset. But the lighting changes quickly, so be prepared to act fast. So to recap, we learned about the best time of day to take photos. We learned how to use exposure compensation, how to turn on fill flash, and how to work with sun that's behind your subject. 6. Poses: Meet my partner and model, Randy, who was kind enough to help me out with this shoot. Let's talk about how to pose shots. It's a personal choice. You can have your subject post like a model like you see on Instagram or more naturally. I'll be sharing more natural candid shots with you because that's my preference. It feels more authentic, and my model here feels more comfortable with that as well. If your subject is camera shy, there are some tricks to make them more comfortable. Have your subject look away and then look back at the camera, make dumb jokes, play some music to help with ambience. If they're walking or changing positions frequently, that can help get rid of jitters, too. A good tip to make amateur models feel more comfortable is just to tell them to sit down as if they're going to be there for a while and read a book or something like that, and often they'll get quite comfortable. A great idea for a candid city shot is to have someone just casually walking along, checking out a store front or a restaurant. The way to capture that perfect walking shot is to take a series of photos using burst mode. You can activate burst mode by pulling left on the shutter button like this. Now I'll demonstrate it again like this. Now, to pick the perfect photo, you click the photo and then you hit select in the upper left hand side. Now you can scroll through along the bottom and pick your perfect pose. So I'm just selecting my favorite pose here. I'm just going to check it, export it, keep all the other shots just in case. And there's our shot. It looks really natural because our subject actually was walking, and you had the liberty of being able to choose the very best pose. Randy was feeling pretty cheeky today and just leaned against a tree and we're just having a lot of fun just being silly here. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a sideways angle. I had my model put his head on his fist here. Here I'm using my model to show scale of this ancient artifact, and your model doesn't always have to be looking at the camera to make it interesting. This monument's pretty interesting itself. I had him put his hand on the wall and cross his ankles for a more interesting body posture. I think the most important thing is just to have fun and be silly. So to recap, we learned how to make our model comfortable. We learned how to get some natural walking shots and some natural poses. Oh 7. Tips and Tricks: Some tips on focus. You can tap on the screen to change the focus. Here I'm tapping on the building, and now I'm tapping on Randy's face. If you hold down your finger, you can lock the focus, you see I'm turning away and then coming back, the focus has stayed on Randy's face. Don't pinch to use digital zoom because that will degrade the quality. Instead, use your camera's optical lenses. Use the wide angle lens to capture tight indoor spaces or to create fun visual effects. If you do so, keep your subject close to the middle of the frame to avoid distortion. Use the two times lens to zoom in and compress your background. Use the five times Zoom to really compress the background. Clean your lens often as fingerprints, sunscreen, and pocket gunk can make the lens cloudy and dirty. To blur moving objects, take your photo in live mode and then go in and edit and change it from live mode to long exposure. You can also use this trick to remove background activity like traffic as long as your model stays quite still. I have had mixed results with this, but you might want to give it a try. You can shade the lens with your hand. This prevents washed out colors and lens flares. So to recap, we learned about how to lock focus and exposure, how to compress the background using your zoom lenses, and how to create long exposures. 8. Editing: So the built in edit mode in the Photos app is actually pretty powerful. It's all you really need unless you want to do something advanced, such as selecting a subject to lighten up, which I'll show you in a minute. Tap the photo to bring up Edit mode, tap Edit. And here, you'll see you can change the background blur. This is no background blur, and this is the maximum background blur. And then if you click adjust, you'll see there are a bunch of tools here that you can scroll through, and each one is labeled here underneath the picture. What I normally do is go in and adjust the exposure a little bit. What you'll want to do is not get overexposed. You can see how the sun behind Randy's head there is getting really overexposed. So be careful you don't do any of that, and you also obviously don't want to go too dark. In fact, I think this photo is pretty well exposed. Highlights brings up the whites or brings down overexposed bits. Shadows makes the blacks quite dark. Contrast increases the difference between whites and dark. So this is when you go minus, you'll see it gets quite flat. And then if you increase the contrast, it gets almost cartoon like. Sometimes it helps just to bring the contrast up just a couple points here. Brightness is just overall brightness of the picture and saturation If you go minus, it turns it into black and white, or you can scroll up and make it really, really outrageously oversaturated. Again, sometimes I just pop the saturation up just a little bit. Vibrance kind of does the same thing, but it keeps skin tones intact, which is good for portraits. Warmth increases the orange and the red tones. So you'll see if I pop that up, it gets really, really orange, and if I pull it back, it goes really blue. Tint changes the green red balance. Sharpness, I don't usually touch this, but if you want to overly sharp picture, you can experiment with that. Vignette's kind of fun. If you go this way, you get white corners, and if you go the other way, you can get black corners. Sometimes it's good to add a little bit of black corner vignetting to make your subject pop in the middle. But I'm not going to touch that right now. Filters, I don't really touch these. They're presets. Might be kind of fun for a particular look. If you wanted to crop, you just adjust the corners like this, and then you can move the middle bit around here if you want. If you need to straighten the horizon, you can adjust it this way by sliding this little slider up and down, and in the upper left there, you can flip the photo. Click done. To do more advanced editing, like lightening up a subject, I usually use an app called Light room because it's free and quite powerful. So I'm just going to click on the photo to open it. The first thing we'll do is create a mask, so we'll hit this button here. Then we'll click the plus button. We'll click Select Subject, and AI will select our subject automatically. Sometimes you have to do some fine tuning. As you'll see here, it did a pretty good job. However, it has captured a little bit of the bench here by Randy's arm. So what we need to do is modify the mask a little bit. I'm going to click this little minus button down here, subtract from mask. I'll be using a brush to paint it away, and all I'm doing now is just painting the red bits. What I will do is just click this checkmark here. And now I have to go back to select the mask in order to make edits to the mask area. So I've clicked the mask, and I am going to click this light button here and adjust the exposure. And as you can see, it's just him who's being adjusted now. So I'll bring it up just a little bit here. Shadows. I'll bring up the shadows just a bit. White. I think I'll bring the exposure up just a little bit more here. And maybe a little bit of contrast. So I'm just going to click the checkmark here. Once you're happy with your edits, you can click the three dots here and click Save Copy to Device. So to recap this lesson, we learned how to edit just using our camera app and then some more advanced masking and adjustments in Lightroom. 9. Photo Book: I did quite a bit of research and reached the conclusion that MxBook offers the best quality and price combined with an easy to use app. You can design your book on your laptop like I'm going to show you or download an app onto your phone. Essentially, the principles are the same for both, but it's easier, I find, at least on my laptop. Let's get started building our book now. Go to xbook.com and create a new account. Just click here, enter email, create a password. I got started right away here, but I'm not sure if it's because I had already signed up for an account, but you might be able to get started right away as well. Now the fun can start. We're going to choose a theme and insert our pictures. Now, to choose a theme, you hover over photo books here. My book is a travel photo book, but as you can see, we have a year in review, holiday, family, kids, baby, et cetera. The one I chose is called Modern Geometris. So I am just going to go ahead and click Start Book, and this is the window that you're presented with first off. You can add photos at any time, but I like to get started with a good collection of photos. So you can just click this button here, and you're presented with a dialogue box where you can select your photos. Okay, so I have gone ahead and uploaded my images, and now they're appearing in the left hand photos menu. I think my favorite part of the Mxbook service is this button right here. Auto Create Book. It gives you a great jump start and places all your photos in the layout. Now, in just a few seconds, it has analyzed my photos, auto selected layouts, and inserted my photos for me. Being a graphic designer, I'm quite particular about certain things. So I will be going through and fine tuning some of this stuff, but it's a really good place to start. Let's dive into the interface a little bit, so I can show you all the awesome features that MxBook has. Then we can get started right away designing our cover. On the left here, you'll see the photos tab, and it shows you all the photos that you have. This is layouts, and they are organized by number of photos per page. And if you roll over, it will give you a preview in the main working area. Here you can add backgrounds. There's some stickers you can click and drag. Here's the textbox, can add bold, italic, a line center left, right, and we can change the fill color and add a border to the textbox. And there's even AI caption ideas. If you want to change the theme of your book entirely, you can always select one from a different theme to mix and match. And there's a Beta feature with a map on it. So you just here enter the location where you'd like the pin, and it will generate the map for you. You can always collapse the window if you need more room. Here's an undo button if you don't like what you've done, or if you undo it and you want to redo it, there's that option as well. You can add pages, delete pages, over here, you can do a full screen view of all your pages and you can click and drag to rearrange them. You can share to collaborate with other people. And when you're ready to order, there's the Order button up top there. You can toggle the view to single page or two page spread, and to navigate through the pages, you can just click these arrows here. If you want to zoom in, click the plus button. You'll see this little red box here. So if you grab that, you can navigate within the Zoomed area. To get rid of that pop up, you have to go back to 100%. If you have more questions that I didn't cover, you can always click this button here and Mxbook has a lot of video support. If you're anything like me, you'll want to jump in right away and start experimenting. So now that we're familiar with the interface, we can get started designing the cover. First things first, let's change the layout here. So there's a lot of graphics here. I wanted a really plain cover, and I want to put the blue mask on the cover. So the first thing we'll do is go over to the left hand menu here and click layouts. Click one because it's a single photo that I want. And there's a plain one right here. So I'm just going to click that to apply. Now I'm going to go back to the photos tab here. And here's the blue mask. So I'm just going to click and I'm going to drag the photo onto there. Make sure you uncheck this box here. What it does when it's checked is hide your used photos to avoid duplication. The reason I personally like to uncheck that is I like to see all the photos that I have. I will go through manually and avoid duplication myself. Okay, let's go ahead and adjust the photo and add some text. So when you click on the photo, you'll see that you have these options up top here. So when you zoom in, you're basically cropping it a little bit tighter. And you can see these arrows that go up down left, right, and you can drag your photo around. So actually, that's a bit too tight. I'm going to zoom out just one click, and I'm going to make sure that it's even left to right. Now let's add some text. And I'm going to go over to the left hand side here and scroll down to the text option. This button here adds a text box, and then you go over here and you just click. You just simply start typing. I'm just going to type turkey here. And I'm double clicking to select the text. I don't like this font. So what I'm going to do here is go over and choose Hello Lucky is the typeface that I quite like here. I'm going to change the font size to 128 and change the color here to white because the background is black. I'd like to center the text between these two minarets here. So I'm going to grab this right handle, drag it over to the right. Grab the left handle, drag it over to the left. And the text is a line centered, and I'm going to grab the top handle here to raise it up a little bit. There you have it. It's right in the middle, and that makes a really nice simple cover. Before you order your book, you can share it with friends or family, and you can even invite people to edit. So up here, you'll see there's a share button. You have three options here. Share your project, invite others to edit, and then you can invite others to order your finished book. So once we're happy with our book, we are going to click Order. Let's give it a five star. I thought that was pretty cool. So there are three different options, soft cover for more economy, hardcover, for durability, and the lay flat has thick pages and lays flat so you can spread a picture over two spreads. I chose the larger size here. I've heard the everyday semi gloss is a nice finish. And for the cover, I'd like to choose matte rather than glossy. I have a coupon code here for my first time. I can choose more than one if I like. And now we're going to add to Cart. And when we're ready to purchase, we can click Check out. Once you've finished one book, you'll realize that you can create lots of other products like recipe books, yearbooks, annuals, and family histories. The options are endless. So to recap, we opened a Mxbook account. We uploaded and placed your photos. We edited the layouts. If you want to learn more in depth about Mxbook, you can take my class, creating a photo boook with Mxbook. 10. Conclusion: Congratulations. You now have the tools you need to take your photography game to the next level, no matter where you are. To recap, we learned how to unlock powerful camera settings, how to find the perfect location for your shoot, how to work with various lighting conditions, tons of tips and tricks you can use. We learned about different lenses, how to pose and frame your subject, how to enhance your photos right in the Photos app, and how to make a photo book. Please upload some photos for your project. I'm happy to give you teacher feedback, and you can also inspire others with your photos. Thank you so much for joining me on this class. Happy Travels and Happy shooting. For additional learning opportunities, you can check out my other classes, cinematic shooting on the iPhone, Golden hour photography, and how to create photoboks with MxBook. Hope to see you there. O