iPhone camera hacks for parents

10 quick tips on how to use your iphone for better images

As much as I love a “real” camera you just don’t see too many modern families carrying them for their day to day memories so I decided over the last year or so to really get into learning the ins and outs of mobile photography and how it can compliment or even do the heavy lifting for some types of images when documenting my family.

To that end here are my 10 favorite tips for how to improve your iPhone photography for parent photography. Many of these tips are built in features of the native camera app but since not everyone knows how to use them, this could dramatically improve results for a lot of parents. If you have further questions hit me up in the comments and I’ll do my best to help.

1.       Change the brightness of your images by tapping your subject and then swiping up or down on the sun icon.

Ever wish you could get your phone to stop making images too dark, especially when the light in your picture is coming from behind your subject? This is the fix. 1. Tap and hold on the face/subject you want until you see on screen AF/AE lock appear in yellow. This will lock the focus and the brightness of your photos until you tap elsewhere on the screen again. Now next to the box where you’ve locked the exposure and focus you’ll see a sun icon. Swipe up or down on that to make your picture brighter or darker. Then take your pics. Awesome right?

Note the yellow AE/AF lock icon at the top of the frame. You get this by long pressing on your subject. This will allow you to make a change to the brightness of the image and keep it locked until you’re done. In the second clip you can see the sun icon next to Viv’s face. I’m pushing that icon up and down to change the brightness of the image.

2.      Use the volume rocker as your shutter button instead of the screen

OK there are two main reasons this really helps -

One - if you’re trying to take a selfie by tapping on the screen it can be really awkward for your hand, and if you’re like me, you’ll mess up the framing as you attempt to trigger the camera. By using the volume rocker to make a photo you can keep a better grip on your phone and get a better framed image.

Two - if you’re into using the night mode using the volume rocker will help keep your photos more steady and you’ll get less blur. If you’re into images with stars, city-scapes at night, or landscapes also remember your phone has a self timer so you can set it down somewhere and have it trigger after a countdown to keep things ultra steady.

3.     Your iPhone has up to three dedicated camera lenses (depending on the model year) and using any zoom level other than those native to your lens(s) are interpolated and therefore reduce the quality of your photos.

Ok so the sharpness of the photos coming from your phone is good but it’s still important not to throw away resolution by using and in-between zoom setting.

iPhones have up to three cameras (.5 ultra wide | 1x normal | 3x telephoto) and using any of those offers the best sharpness the phone can offer but at ANY other zoom setting the app is digitally faking/cropping the zoom setting which is lowering the sharpness of your final result.

This is the ‘Ultra-Wide” camera from the iPhone which is the .5x setting in the camera app. If your iPhone has two cameras this and the normal 1x camera are the two choices.

This is the normal lens for any iPhone which is labeled at 1x in the camera app.

This is the telephoto lens from the 12 Pro Max which is labeled as 2.5x in the camera app.

So think about your phone having three different cameras for different framing but not a zoom lens. If you pinch the zoom feature in too far, in fact, you’ll eventually get an image so un-sharp you can’t even get a quality 4x6 inch print because you’ve gone from using the full resolution of your camera (12 megapixels) down to less than one megapixel. One megapixel just for reference is less than the resolution of even your screen. So.. don’t do that :)

Here is a 1x lens image from my iPhone with the blue crop lines that represent how much you can crop/zoom into the image by pinching. NOTE this zoom/pinch is digital and lowers the quality of the photo as you move in until it’s so low quality that it no longer looks good for anything.

Here is a BEST case scenario adding extra zoom from an iPhone in good light where I’ve pinched into the image and you can see the quality loss. Even though the iPhone will resize this image to make this picture 12 megapixels it simply doesn’t have anywhere near the sharpness of a normal (non-zoomed) image. This is what we call ‘lipstick on a pig’ in the business.

4.       If you want to soften the background focus using the 2.5/3x lens in portrait mode

Portrait mode has been around for a couple of years but a lot of us forget to use it. To make the background of your images go beautifully soft and out of focus just turn on portrait mode which is found right above the on screen trigger button in the camera app. This will force you into your 2.5x camera (if you have a three lens phone) and to make it work you’ll need to be in good light as well as be at least a few feet away from your subject. I know it's just another thing to remember BUT if pays off big when the conditions are right. My advice, use it for portraits where the subject is aware of you but not for anything candid.

Here is the result from the 2.5x telephoto camera from my iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Here is the iPhone 12 Pro Max in ‘Portrait’ mode using the 2.5x telephoto camera combined with artificial intelligence that softens the background to look like the results from a professional camera. This really helps you subject pop out and gives the photos a more 3D look.

5.       If you’re in the iPhone camera app a swipe left on the red shutter button will take a very fast sequence of photos, holding down the red button will start a video even if you’re not in video mode

This tip I really love. OK so let’s say you’re taking pictures and you suddenly also want to capture some video OR you want to take a super fast sequence of images like during a sporting event. From the camera app, if you take the on screen shutter button and pull to the left, your camera will take a burst of images for as long as you hold it. This allows you to capture the perfect part of a swing, kick, or shot and pick the best of the best afterward. If you hold down on the shutter button, you’ll begin recording a video clip, no buttons to remember in the heat of the moment, just push and hold.

6.       If you buy one accessory for your phone in terms of taking photos pick a phone holder and mini tripod so you can set up your camera and be in the image/take a time-lapse/video with you in it, etc.

OK so nobody likes to carry accessories but if you want to solve a couple of typical problems, I would really recommend a phone holder that has a kickstand or a mounting point on it for a tripod or for balancing the phone on a tabletop/surface. This will allow you to be in a family photo by using the self timer, take steady video, use the time-lapse function, etc. Here are my favorite phone holder and mini tripod.

7.       If you want better video buy a small mic – the audio improvement is the best thing you can do for video

The only other accessory you might want to consider for your phone is an external microphone. This will vastly improve your videos by making the audio sound so much better. I’d only use it for more video dedicated projects but let’s say your daughter has a recital and you want to record it to send to family. This is how you can get that done and create something you really enjoy. Here’s my favorite mic for iPhone. NOTE you will need the lightning to mini plug adapter that came with your phone to plug in most external mics. You will also need this mount to get it on your phone. It’s not a huge investment and you will see a BIG payoff in the quality of your home movies.

8.       If you want to more easily share your images change the default format from HEIF to JPG

One of the improvements Apple made by default on newer iPhone’s is the switch from using the file format JPEG to HEIF. This will save space on your phone since the HEIF has better compression but it comes at the expense of being far less compatible with the rest of the world. So if you like to share your images via email, cloud storage, etc. you might want to switch it back. Go to Settings/Camera/Formats/Most Compatible to switch it back to the JPEG standard which all phones and computers can use.

9.       My favorite app for editing images is SnapSeed and for video is iMovie. Both are free!

Editing on your phone has gotten so good over the years that there hardly anything you can’t do in terms of editing. I really love the app SnapSeed which allows me to do 99% of what I do on a dedicated computer with Photoshop. I can change the brightness, color, crop, contrast etc. right on my phone. Here’s a tutorial on my most used features of Snapseed.

iMovie is also a great app if you have some light duty needs in terms of making home videos your phone. I’ll be doing a tutorial on it too in the near future so stay tuned!

10.   Back up your images to icloud/dropbox or amazon photos so if you lose your iphone your images and videos are backed up.

The importance of backup really can’t be understated these days. You can use iCloud, Dropbox, Amazon, or a dozen other services but whatever you do it will be worth whatever the price to make sure you don’t lose all of your memories. Choose one and go with it. I use Dropbox but that’s just because I use the service for other work related projects and I already have the account. iCloud is standard and it gets the job done. To set these types of apps up all you have to do generally is download the app and then give it permission to access your photos.