50 things I have learned about iPhone photography

In this post you are going to discover the 50 most important things I have learned about iPhone photography. Over the past two years I have taken some really great photos, and at least ten times more photos that did not turn out the way I wanted. I have done a lot of photo editing, which often only made my photos worse. I have spent countless hours on social media sharing my work and following the work of other photographers. And I have learned many things in the process.

I hope that by sharing the most important lessons I have learned I can accelerate your learning and help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made. But most importantly, I hope to inspire you to become a more active iPhone photographer. Let’s get started!

General iPhoneography tips

1. Getting a better camera won’t make you a better photographer.

2. Any iPhone is good enough for creating great photography. I’ve seen great photos taken with iPhone 3G. You really have no excuse.

3. Consistent practice is the best way to improve your iPhoneography. Keep practicing even when you’re out of ideas, and you’ll eventually create something amazing.

4. Treat your iPhone camera as if it was an expensive DSLR. If you only use your iPhone to create quick snapshots, you’ll never get anything else out of it.

Taking great photos

5. First learn how to take great photos. Only then it makes sense to master editing.

6. Become an observer of light. On a very fundamental level, photography is all about light, so the better you understand light, the better photographer you will become.

7. Learn to predict how the scene is going to change in the immediate future. Will that person briefly appear in the reflection after a few seconds? Be prepared when that moment comes.

8. The very best photos convey a strong emotion or tell a great story.

9. Mystery is the best way to tell a story in your photos. The best stories are already in the mind of the viewer. If you create mystery, the viewer can fill in the blanks and create a story that’s uniquely theirs.

10. Always take a few seconds and pause before taking a shot. Is this really the best angle and the best composition, or should you try something else instead?

11. The easiest way to improve your photography is to work on the angle and composition.

12. Learn the fundamentals of composition, get comfortable using them, and then learn how to break them. You must know the rules before you can break them.

13. Turn on the gridlines until you start thinking about any scene in terms of the grid.

14. Practice composition with simple photos that have a lot of empty space. Large open areas are perfect places to start with iPhone photography.

15. Always ask yourself what the main subject of your photo is, or what is the first thing that the viewer will notice. If there is no subject, is it really worth taking that shot?

16. Your composition should emphasize the main subject or subjects. And no, your subject should not be in the center of the frame.

17. Placing your subject even slightly off the center will greatly enhance your photos.

18. Think about photos in terms of balance. If you put your main subject in one corner of the image, you also want to have something of interest in the opposite corner to keep the composition balanced.

19. Turn on HDR for landscape photography and when sky takes up a large part of your photo.

20. Don’t use HDR for photos of movement and when you need to take many photos quickly.

21. Shoot against strong backlight (e.g. sunset sky) to create silhouettes.

22. Learn to quickly adjust focus and exposure – and how to lock it by holding down your finger.

23. Never use digital zoom. Zoom with your feet or crop your photos afterwards.

24. Use volume buttons for a camera-like shooting experience.

25. Use the volume buttons on your headphones for remote shutter release – or to stay discreet when taking photos in public.

26. You should be able to take the iPhone out of your pocket, turn it on, and open camera from the lock screen in two seconds or less. You don’t want to miss that perfect shot.

27. There are some great iPhoneography accessories on the market, but you don’t really need them to take great photos. Buying cool gear won’t make you a better photographer.

Editing and apps

28. No editing can turn a bad photo into a good one.

29. The easiest way to ruin a good photo is to mindlessly apply strong vintage filters.

30. If you are going to use filters, make sure you adjust their strength. The default filter strength will almost always be too strong and result in terribly overedited photos.

31. Your editing should enhance what is already great about the photo, and perhaps add a certain feel that complements the message of that photo. Everything else is unnecessary.

32. Learn the essential adjustments such as brightness, contrast and saturation first. Only then you should look into more advanced effects and filters.

33. Don’t download 50 photo apps. Only get a few and make sure you know how to use them.

34. Snapseed, VSCO Cam, Camera+ and Mextures are great apps to start with.

35. Don’t add text on your photos. Text is distracting and never looks good.

Photo management

36. Always have a backup of your entire photo library. And another one.

37. Despite technological advancements, external HDD is still the most practical way to back up a large photo library. Just don’t keep it in the same bag as your laptop.

38. iCloud is great for automatically transferring your iPhone photos to iPhoto.

39. Keep your edited photos in a separate photo album for easy access.

40. Don’t take multiple identical photos. Avoid the pain of deleting them later. Instead you should change the angle or composition and then shoot again.

Sharing and social networks 

41. Share your work on social networks to stay motivated and get feedback.

42. Follow other photographers whose work you admire to stay inspired and get new ideas.

43. It’s OK to copy someone else’s style for the sake of learning. You’ll eventually discover your own unique style, so you don’t have to worry about copying someone else initially.

44. Don’t try to be active on 10 different photo sharing sites. It will drive you crazy. Just pick your favorite and do a good job there. I only post my photos on Instagram.

45. Don’t use Instagram filters if you want to stand out on Instagram.

46. Always respond to people who took the time to comment on your photos. Simply saying “thanks” can make a huge difference.

47. Don’t tag your photos using every single hashtag you know. You don’t want to look like a spammer, do you?

48. Don’t watermark your photos. Watermarks are ugly, and nobody is going to steal your photos anyway.

49. Only share your best photos so that your feed looks great. Quality always beats quantity.

50. Digital photos are transient. Print your best work to make it timeless.

Which of these tips are your favorites, and is there anything you would add to this list? Or is there anything that you disagree about? Please let everyone know in the comments.

This article is written by Emil Pakarklis, a passionate iPhoneographer and the founder of iPhonePhotographySchool.com. If you want to learn how to edit great photos with the iPhone, check out his free iPhone photo editing video course.

9 tips for finding the perfect angle in iPhone photography

One of the most important things determining the quality of a photo is the angle from which it was taken. Even if you have a really interesting subject and you follow the most important composition guidelines, you still need to find that unique and interesting angle to really make your photo shine.

In this article I’m going to share my 9 best tips for finding the perfect angle so that your iPhone photos really stand out and look as great as they possibly can…

1. Move around to improve composition

Whenever you’re trying to pick the best angle for a photo, you should always think about balancing the composition, and the angle that you shoot from makes a huge difference for the horizontal and vertical balance of the photo. Let me show you what I mean with an example.

In this photo my subjects are the tree in the foreground and the mountain in the background. The photo is balanced horizontally as the two subjects are at the opposite sides of the frame. However, it’s not balanced vertically as there is nothing of interest in the top half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the bottom half of the frame.

Now let’s look at the same scene from a different angle. The next photo was shot from the same location with the iPhone positioned higher and the lens directed more towards the ground.

Here you can see pretty much the opposite – there’s nothing of interest at the bottom half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the top. It’s tempting to think that the best solution would be aligning both the tree and the mountain centrally, but then all visual weight would be in the middle, and the top and the bottom would then look empty.

However, I was able to balance this image by walking closer to the tree so that the shadow is also included in the composition. Now the tree takes up the top and central parts of the image, the mountain is in the central part, and the shadow fills up the bottom third of the image. I hope this example shows you how easy it can be to adjust composition by just moving around a little.

2. Shoot from the height of your subject

We look at the world from the height of our eyes, and thus it’s only natural to also take photos from the same height. However, in many photography situations – such as taking photos of children, pets or plants – shooting from the height of your eyes will almost always result in bad photos.

When photographing children and animals, you should take photos from their height and thus capture the world from their point of view. If you just shoot from the height of your own eyes, your subjects will literally look like they’ve been tossed on the ground.

3. Get close… and even closer

A great way to make your photos more intimate is to get closer to your subjects – even closer than you would feel comfortable. That way your photos can convey the kind of intimacy that is normally only found in real life.

Did you notice that this photo is shot from the height of the cat?

4. Add perspective to your photos

When possible, try to choose an angle that will show perspective in your photos. There are a few different ways you can do this. If your subject is far away, one simple way to show perspective is to juxtapose it with larger-looking objects in the foreground as seen below.

If the view extends into the distance, you can show perspective by shooting from a higher angle as seen in the next photo. I took this photo from a staircase so that my main subject – the silhouette of a women – is situated against the street extending far into the background.

Another great way to show perspective is to get really low with your iPhone. That creates an exaggerated perspective by making the objects in the foreground look massive, which can be used to emphasize details on the ground level and make the image more immersive.

5. Include interesting reflections

An easy way to greatly improve your photos and make mundane scenes exciting is to include reflections in your photos. While you can find reflections on many different surfaces, water is perhaps the most obvious medium for interesting and unique reflections.

In general, I prefer to include both the actual subjects and their refections in the photo, and I like to make the reflections equally or more prominent than the other parts of the photo. Often the only way you can do this is by placing the lens of your iPhone just a little bit above the water. If the iPhone is even an inch higher, you probably won’t be able to frame the photo as needed.

Another great reason to place the iPhone within an inch above the water is that even the tiniest waves – which you can also create yourself – will look massive and distort the reflection, which of course also adds perspective to the photo. This is something you can only do with a smartphone since in traditional cameras the lens is placed much higher from the bottom of the camera.

6. Include shadows in the composition

Many photos can be greatly enhanced by also including shadows in the composition. This works particularly well if you shoot within the so-called golden hour, which is the hour before sunset (or after sunrise) when the shadows are longer and much more pronounced.

To make sure that the shadows fit in with the rest of the composition, treat them like you would treat any other photography subject. Quite often it means that your photos with shadows should be shot from the top with the ground taking up a large part of the composition.

7. Shoot from the hip

Shooting from hip height is one of the best ways to improve your street photos and other photos of people that are not portraits. By changing the angle like this you can make the photo more dynamic and interesting just because we normally don’t look at other people from that angle.

You could either get down on your knees to maintain full control over the process, or you can just lower your iPhone and literally shoot from the hip to add some randomness to your photos.

8. Tilt your photos for a more dynamic look

Who said you should always keep your iPhone straight and take perfectly horizontal photos? For some reason that’s exactly what we end up doing 99% of the time. However, there are situations when tilting the iPhone a little will result in a far more interesting and unique photos.

This is one of my favorite iPhone photos, and it’s made much more interesting by the subtle but perceptible tilting of the frame. Of course, the subjects couldn’t walk like this in real life, thus making this photo a bit surreal.

9. Always keep experimenting

You should always keep experimenting and looking for a unique and interesting angle for your photos. Don’t just take a photo the way you see the scene, try to change the angle and see how that changes the photo. Don’t just settle for the first version of what could be a great photo.

Maybe you want to get down on your knees, maybe you want to climb the nearby stairs and take the photo from there, or maybe you want to get closer to your subject. Always keep experimenting with unique shooting angles, and you won’t be disappointed with the results.

How to access the list view in iOS 7 Calendar app

Sometimes there are some features you take for granted. Take the list view in the Calendar app for example. In iOS 6, it was pretty straightforward. You had three tabs at the bottom of the app for List, Day, and Month views. So simple, my mom could figure it out.

With the iOS 7 redesign though, some things got more complicated, or at the very least less obvious. The same list view feature that was so obvious in iOS 6 suddenly became a little more subtle. In fact, it became so subtle that some people are confused as to where it went, my mom included…

I figured that if that was confusing for a few users, it might be worth publishing a post about it, because clearly my mom and the handful of readers’ emails we received about that can’t just be isolated cases. As a matter of fact, if you use the stock Calendar app, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself the question at least once before: “where is the list view in the iOS 7 Calendar app?”

Today, I answer this question.

Of course, if you already know the answer, please spare us the “slow news day?” and “I’ve known this for months” types of comments. If you already know this, good for you. There is no need to bring down people who don’t, including my mom, or iDB for sharing simple tips about iOS 7.

So, where is the list view in the new Calendar app? Is it gone? No, it’s just right here hiding in plain sight, except its icon isn’t the one you’re probably looking for.

Whether you are in the year, month or day view, you can tap the magnifying glass icon at any time to be taken to the list view. As I said, it’s definitely not as obvious now. To me, the magnifying glass icon is synonymous of “search,” not necessarily of list view. Note that once you are in list view, you can easily search for any event in your calendar by using the search box at the top.

A simple tip indeed, but definitely one that will help my mom and maybe yours get the best of iOS 7.