As I've taken photography classes throughout my university education, I've been told that the best camera is the one you have with you. It's the rough truth that you aren't always going to have your fancy DSLR hanging around your neck with the perfect lens you need for each particular situation you are facing.
"Believe it or not, you're holding the best point-and-shoot camera right in your pocket" Derek Miller, BYU-Idaho Digital Imaging Professor
At first, I had a hard time accepting this as truth. I got to the point myself where I was actually taking less photos in my life because I didn't want to simply take an iPhone photo when I didn't have my DSLR with me. I wanted each photo to be something extraordinary and "fine-art" worthy. But now I've come to realize that we really can produce beautiful content with our iPhones, and I want to give you guys a few tips about how to capture things with our smart phones so that we produce images a little closer to the "extraordinary" that we often find ourselves looking for.
You may think that in order to make your photos as extraordinary as possible, you need to cram as much great content as you can into your frame. In reality, that is not usually the case. Look for beautiful simplicity. Leave breathing room around your subjects. This will not only result in a trendy minimal look, but it will allow your iPhone camera to better capture what you are shooting. More things in a frame only give more likelihood for bad lighting, focus, or other inconvenient camera error.
Our iPhones are pretty smart, and will usually nail the focus on their own. But since focus is such an important part of making our images extraordinary, I think it's important to always touch wherever you want your focal point to be on your screen. This will redefine the focus to wherever you touch, and can also improve your lighting situation as well, as your iPhone now knows which part of the photo it should be exposing for.
If you take a look at the iPhone cases above, you can see that there are little holes for the lens of your iPhone camera to peek through. However, not all cases have those holes. I have a LifeProof case (because clumsy) and there is actually a (usually dirty) glass layer of my case that goes over the top of my camera lens. I've come to realize that this HUGELY degrades your image quality. I would highly suggest either using a phone case with a cut-out for your camera lens, or removing your case while trying to take higher quality images if it has this extra layer of glass.
Jaci Carlson is the poster child for beautiful iPhone photography. You'll notice that she follows all the guidelines I have listed so far, but she also takes it a step further. She has a consistent editing style in her photos. This goes far beyond using Instagram filters. By downloading editing apps on your phone, you can make meaningful edits to your photos that will increase the value of each and every image you take. Everyone has a different editing style, so I can't tell you exactly how to edit your photos. But what I can do is encourage you to edit them outside of filters that are just too much.
I hope you guys will be able to take some of these iPhones photography tips and produce some extraordinary photos with the camera you have right in your pocket.
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Xoxo,
@sarahjanele