iPhone Awesomeness

I'm a little befuddled by the thought I just had that, as of now, I own several cameras that take good photographs, 2 of which will record video, and my third source of video is my cell phone. It hardly works to call it a cell phone anymore. It's a wireless phone with all those other things on it.

I did some reading on the Apple web site about taking photographs with the iPhone. As you may know, it's pretty straight forward but a few quick tips couldn't hurt.




I find that, just like with my Canon SD780 IS compact camera, I have a hard time holding my iPhone steady for a photograph. One of the ways I've found to reduce the shake induced by holding the camera between your fingers and slowly squeezing is to just leave my finger off the camera until I'm ready to shoot and then just tapping the camera button. It reminds me of the way a compact camera will often work better if you press the shutter button and immediately release it. Then you'll wait a second until the camera takes the photo. The photographs I'm getting from my iPhone are quite acceptable but I haven't gotten to the point at which my iPhone photos look like they were taken with a hand held camera. The camera takes the shot as you remove your finger from the button so another technique that might work to make your shots less shaky is to rest your finger on the camera button and then remove it quickly when time to shoot.

Another thing I learned by reading the instructions is that you can spot focus the iPhone camera. Look again at this picture from the Apple iPhone web site.
Those little squares are focusing points. The Apple instructions say that you can tap on any part of the picture and the camera will focus there

I tried it. It really, really works. I'll admit it's not exactly adjusting your ISO and aperture for a shallow focal length but it does give you the idea that you can make sure whatever caused you to whip out the iPhone and grab a shot will be the thing in focus in the picture.