Photojournalism, like any other profession, has its own set of ethics. Photographs taken for an article should reflect reality as much as possible. It’s OK to adjust your exposure, white balance and contrast a little, but only to make the image look more like real life. You can’t just look at your sky and think, “you know what, I think this sky should be orange instead of blue.” Well, you can think it, but you can’t change it.
If you are practicing photography as an art form, however, the rules change. Now, suddenly, you can do whatever the hell you feel like doing. If you want, you are perfectly welcome to capture the magical version of events. So let’s just say this article is about photography as an art form, and not a report on local events. Violà. The rules have changed.
Why the sudden change in style, you ask? One word: iPhone. iPhone photos are simply better looking and more interesting when they are altered using photography apps on your phone. For the past month, I’ve been going about my daily life, carrying my iPhone, per usual. But I made it a point to use only my iPhone when taking recreational photos. The goal was to challenge myself and to develop a better knowledge of iPhoneography.
By the end of the month, I’d learned a lot. I’d also taken way more personal photographs than I’d ever expected to. So without further ado, here’s what I learned from my month-long journey into iPhoneography:
1. ProCamera is awesome, but make sure you buy the right one. Is it just me, or does it seem like every time a good thing comes along, someone tries to copy it. If you search the App store for ProCamera, two different pro camera apps come up: Jens Daemgen’s ProCamera and Samer Azzam’s ProCam 5. I don’t know which came first, and I really don’t care. I like Jens Daemgen’s ProCamera. It gives you the control of a professional camera (except aperture — you can’t change your iPhone camera’s aperture) and allows you to capture exciting HDR (I’ll explain this later) and night photographs. Check out the official tutorial video below to learn how to use it.
2. You can take pictures at night with the right app. There are a lot of great night photography apps for the iPhone. I’ve tried Slow Shutter, Cortex Cam, and ProCamera’s LowLight Plus. I’ve gotten used to LowLight Plus, which, most of the time, doesn’t even require a tripod.
3. HDR isn’t just for professionals anymore. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It’s a fancy name for a technique that allows your camera to capture more detail in a scene with both bright lights and dark darks. Now you can get many cameras to capture HDR photos for you automatically, including your iPhone. When you tell your iPhone to capture an HDR photo, it takes between three and five different photographs, each at a different exposure, and then combines them for you automatically. It’s great for sunset photos. My favorite iPhone HDR is ProCamera’s vividHDR. You can read about it here.
4. Enhancing colors with Snapseed or iColorama filters make a good photo better. Enough about ProCamera. Let’s talk about Snapseed and iColorama. Both have filters that help make the colors in your photos pop. Snapseed has Pop, Accentuate, and Morning Looks, and iColorama has Enhance (listed under Tone). Have fun. Almost everything looks better with bolder, brighter colors. No that lizard wasn’t really bright red; it was a reddish brown. The palm tree it’s perched on wasn’t that green, either.
5. Stackables can fix a drab landscape. I’d never heard about this app until I read Kat Sloma’s Art with an iPhone. I soon found out that nothing’s better for fixing a boring landscape photo. Crystal Beach doesn’t really look like this, but who cares?
6. iColorama’s Water-B style does a great job of making your photos look like watercolor paintings. There are other apps that specialize in turning your photos into watercolor paintings, but I really don’t need any more than iColorama’s Water-B style. I love how it adds the texture of the underlying watercolor paper. It’s great for waterscapes, as you might have guessed.
7. Adding stars, moons, and reflections to your photos is fun. If you’ve ever been to Crystal Beach, then you might recognize the tree in the photo below. But other than that? Pure fantasy. The sky wasn’t purple, and you couldn’t see the stars. I added them with an app called Alien Sky. In the photo above, I added the reflection in the water with an app called Reflect. The water was too choppy that day to capture a good reflection.
8. Food (and drink) photography is about capturing someone else’s art. Don’t fuck it up with color filters. No one wants to eat a purple slice of pizza. And not everything you eat is worthy of a photo. Out of all the meals I ate in the month of January, only one was photo-worthy — this was brunch/lunch at The Living Room on Main. My homemade chicken quesadillas, although tasty, weren’t pretty.
How do you get your food to look as pretty in your photo as it does on your plate? There’s a few different techniques I use.
First of all, you want to make sure you have good light. More than any other subject I can think of, food loves natural light. This is why I go to restaurants before dark and ask to be seated near a window whenever I am planning on doing a little food photography.
Second of all, and I think I’ve already mentioned this once, but you want to get the colors right. If your food ends up having a yellowish or bluish tinge due to incorrect white balance, it suddenly looks just a little less appetizing.
Third, get close. Let that sandwich fill your frame.
Fourth, iPhone food shots tend to look better when shot from above, especially if your plate is setting on a rustic wood table or a vintage red-and-white checkered table cloth.
Finally, if you are not taking the shot from above, you can minimize noisy or undesirable backgrounds by using the lens blur and vignette effects in Snapseed. The photo below used both. In the mood for a burger now?
9. You don’t need a special location to shoot. Four of these photos were taken in parking lots and two were taken in my front yard. The picture below was taken in a Target parking lot. In Florida. I shit you not.
10. Even with all these fun apps, the iPhone still has its limits. Now that I’ve rambled on for over 1,000 words on how awesome iPhoneography is, I have to tell you where it falls short. The biggest problems are low resolution and noise. There’s no way we could blow up one of these photos for the cover and make it look good — they’re just too small, and some are too noisy as well. iPhone photos are great for Instagram, but not so great for frameable prints, unless you’re keeping the size in the neighborhood of a 4×6″ photograph. In other words, a professional photographer is always going to need a professional camera, and a photojournalist cannot get by without a good zoom lens. That said, I’m still going to take photos with my iPhone recreationally just like everybody else does. You can find them on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jenringwrites/.
