7 iPhone Camera Hacks For Taking Stunning Photos

Hi, I'm Emil Pakarklis, the founder of iPhone Photography School. And in this video, you'll discover seven hidden iPhone

camera

features that every photographer should know about. Now you probably know how to use your iPhone's

camera

. And it's really easy to take a quick snapshot. But if you want to take your iPhone photography to the next level, you have to go beyond

taking

quick snapshots and learn how to take full control of your iPhone camera. And as you're about to see in this video, the most essential controls on your iPhone's camera are actually completely hidden and most people don't even know about them.

But before we start, I want you to know that I wasn't always the guy teaching thousands of people how to take exceptional iPhone

photos

. I didn't always have 93,000 followers on Instagram. And honestly, not long ago I didn't even know how to take interesting

photos

. But as I continued to work on improving my iPhone photography, I discovered seven essential camera features that Apple has all but hidden from casual iPhone users. So only the best photographers can find these hidden features and use them to take incredible photos that leave everyone else speechless. So, the first hidden iPhone camera feature we are going to discuss is swiping left to open the camera app from the lock screen.

Right now you're looking at the lock screen of my iPhone and from here, if we wanted to open the camera app, you would first have to unlock your iPhone. And you can do this using Touch ID, which sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't work as well, or you can enter your password. But either of these options is somewhat unreliable and both take time. So a better way to start

taking

photos right away is to simply swipe across the screen from right to left and you'll see the camera app open immediately. And by using this feature, you can literally go from taking your iPhone out of your pocket to taking your first photo in two seconds or less.

And this feature is absolutely critical because if you're using it, you can often capture the kinds of moments that you wouldn't otherwise be able to capture. Simply because there wouldn't be enough time for you to get out your iPhone and start taking photos. Now, if you are using an older version of iOS, which is the operating system that runs on your iPhone, this feature may not work for you. But what you have to do then is locate the camera icon in the lower right corner of the lock screen. And just hold your finger on the camera icon at the bottom right and gently slide it up.

And you will also be able to open the camera app very quickly. And you can go from taking your iPhone out of your pocket to taking your first photo in two seconds or less. Now this feature is very simple. But it is very, very important. It literally helped me take hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs. I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise, all because I'm using this feature to quickly open my iPhone's camera app. So the photo you're seeing now is actually one of the iPhone photos I took last year. And of course, all the photos you're going to see in this video were taken and edited with an iPhone.

And in this particular photo, I didn't know this was about to happen, but what happened there is a car drove past me really fast and I saw all this dust coming out of the car. And I immediately realized that it was a unique photo opportunity because cars don't pass this road very often. So I grabbed my iPhone, slid the camera icon up, and was able to capture this photo. And because of this, I ended up with what is one of my favorite photos. This photo did very well on Instagram. I think it had almost 2,000 likes. And there's even a huge copy of this in our office.

But if I hadn't used the swipe up feature from the lock screen, I probably would have missed this photo while typing the passcode. That's why I'm a big fan of this feature. Now, the second iPhone hidden camera feature we're going to talk about is a little more technical. And this is setting the focus and exposure. So right now, I'm once again going to grab my iPhone and show you exactly what I mean by setting focus and exposure. Okay, so right now you're looking at some flowers on the tripod in our office at iPhone Photography School. And what you can see here is that the flowers are in the foreground and they are much brighter than the office in the background.

And you know, I can take some photos, but the thing is that in this situation, I really don't know where the iPhone has focused and if the right parts of the flowers will be in focus. And I also don't have any control over the exposure until I started adjusting it manually. And just to make sure your photos are always sharp and you get the kind of results you're looking for predictably, I highly recommend that you get into the habit of setting the focus and exposure on your iPhone photos. So how do you set focus? Well, it's actually very simple.

All you have to do is touch your finger to the part of the image you want to focus on and the iPhone will automatically focus on that point. So now you can see that I touched my coworker's feet with my finger and you can see that the iPhone has focused on this part of the image. And now you will see that the flowers in the foreground are out of focus. So I took a photo now. And you will see that the iPhone has been refocused. And once again, I don't know where the iPhone has focused this time.

But that's probably not exactly the case. So if I want to adjust the focus here, I definitely have to do it manually. And I can experiment with a few different options here. For example, I can focus on my coworker's feet, or I can focus on this flower here on the right, and each of these points will give me a totally different focus and a different image. Therefore, it is very important to determine what part of the photo you want to be really sharp and focus on that part of the image. So now you can see that I've even focused on the trees outside the window, and that's possible too.

And obviously, the flowers in the foreground are totally blurred. But what you may not know is that when you set the focus with the iPhone, you also set the exposure. Right now I've tapped on the window and essentially the exposure is set to the window. And this essentially determines how light or dark the image is. So now I'm going to touch my finger on the flower in the foreground again and you'll see that the image will immediately become a little bit darker. Simply because by focusing on the flower in the foreground, I am also setting the exposure at that point.

Now, what's also interesting about exposure on the iPhone is that you can adjust it. So all you have to do to adjust the exposure is touch the screen with your finger and slide it down like I'm doing now. And if you do that, the image will become darker and you will be reducing the exposure. Or you can swipe up and in that case the image will become brighter thereby increasing the exposure. And this is another way to control how dark or light your image will become. Okay, right now, just to demonstrate how exposure works on the iPhone, I'm going to set the focus and exposure on my coworker's chair, which is relatively dark.

And as a consequence, the whole image becomes a little brighter and now you can see that the flowers in the foreground are brighter than before. So if you wanted to correct that, you could. This way I can make sure the flowers are correctly exposed, even if the focus is not on the flowers. And in that case all I have left is to slide my finger across the screen and you will see that the image darkens. And now the flowers are properly exposed again, but they are not in focus at the moment. Now, this is obviously not what we want here because the flowers are the most important part of the image.

So I have to pick a flower and make sure it's in perfect focus. So I'm going to take the flower on the top left. And once I've got the flower in focus, I'll adjust the exposure slightly. And the general guideline with exposure is that if you're not sure, you should expose your image to be a little bit darker because if an image is darker, you can always correct it through post-processing. But if you have white areas over exposed areas like we did before on the flowers, what will happen is that no information will be saved in these parts of the image.

And as a consequence, there is no way to recover detail from overexposed areas, so they are simply white. So to make sure that doesn't happen, and also to make the background stand out less, in this image it makes more sense to lower the exposure, which is what we've done now. And now that I'm happy with the exposure, I'll go ahead and take a photo and you'll see what it looks like in a moment. Okay, now you're looking at the first photo we took in the video demo above. And you will see that here we have put the focus on my coworker's feet and as a consequence the flowers in the foreground are out of focus.

And here is the same photo, but this time the focus is set correctly and also, we have reduced the exposure a little bit and you will see that the flower is perfectly focused. It's extremely sharp and the rest of the image is darker, meaning the flowers stand out more against the dark background. And by the way, these are just flowers in our office. Yes, they look great, but the point I'm trying to make here is that you don't have to travel to exotic places to take photos. If you have some flowers at home, that's all you need to start photographing with the iPhone.

But now let me show you one more example of what kind of difference exposure can make in your photographs. The photo you are seeing now is a beautiful winter photo I took recently. And the problem with this photo is that I had to manually adjust the exposure or it just wouldn't work. So now we are looking at these two photos side by side. And in the photo on the left, what I did was focus on the tree, but then I manually increased the exposure by swiping up. While in the photo on the right, in this case I did not adjust the exposure.

And you can see that the difference is huge and certainly the photo on the left looks much nicer. And here the snow, which is white in real life, actually looks white in the photo, while the photo on the right is completely blue. And if you've seen snow, you know that snow doesn't have that color. This is another example of why it is important for you to take control. Not just the focus, but also the exposure to ensure you get sharp, well-lit iPhone photos. Now, the third hidden camera feature we are going to talk about is locking focus and exposure.

You just learned how to set focus and exposure. But it turns out that your iPhone's native camera app also allows you to lock focus and exposure and that's what we'll look at next. Okay, so right now we're looking at the same flowers in our office and I'm going to quickly set the focus and exposure for this photo. And now that I'm happy with the result I'm going to take a photo of it. And what happens when I take a photo is that the iPhone automatically resets the focus and exposure. So you can see that there were some changes on the screen and now all the focus and exposure I had set were gone simply because I took a photo.

And this is obviously not perfect. Because I like those focus and exposure settings, and I might want to take another photo, but now I have to spend a lot of time correcting the settings again. And the way to avoid this is by locking the focus and exposure. So how do you lock focus and exposure? Well, it's actually very simple. All you have to do is tap your finger on the iPhone screen where you want to focus. But instead of letting go of the finger. You have to hold it down on the screen, just for a couple of seconds like I'm doing right now.

And what you'll see is this AE/AF lock text will appear at the top of your screen. And that means you've completely locked the focus and exposure. Right now, you can go ahead and adjust the exposure by sliding your finger up and down on the screen. Which is what I'm doing now. And once you're happy with the exposure, you can go ahead and take a photo. And what you will see now is that you can take a photo and after taking it, the iPhone will not reset the focus or exposure. What's also interesting here is that no matter what you do, the iPhone won't reset focus.

So, you've effectively disabled the iPhone's autofocus feature. And when I move my hand in front of the screen, you will see that nothing happens and the focus and exposure remain just as they were before. What I can also do is even grab my iPhone, try to take some other photo or go somewhere else. But no matter what you do, the focus and exposure will remain unchanged. So now I've put my iPhone back where it wasbefore. And you'll see that we still have the focus and exposure set on the flower just as we wanted. Now, if you want to get out of this, it's pretty easy to do so.

All you have to do is simply touch the screen with your finger and the focus and exposure lock will be disabled. This is how you set and lock focus and exposure on the iPhone. This feature is particularly important when you have a lot of movement or action in the scene and you don't want the iPhone to reset focus and exposure simply because something in the scene moved. Let's say you have people like me in this example and we also have some birds here. And for this photo it was very important for me to set the focus manually.

Because if I don't do that the iPhone could accidentally set the focus on the reflection, which is much closer than the real subjects. So I wanted to make sure the focus is set correctly on the real subjects. And in terms of exposure, I wanted to make sure that the subjects were silhouetted like in this case. And to do this while everything is moving in this scene, I had to lock the focus and exposure. And that's exactly what I did in this photo. And that's why it worked so well. And by the way, this photo was taken with the iPhone 4S a few years ago and no, you don't need the latest iPhone to take great photos.

And here is another photo where I had to use the same technique. So here we have a cyclist, a person I don't know, cycling through the scene. And to make sure that everything was sharp and in focus and that the exposure wasn't ruined just because someone was walking through the scene. What I had to do was set the focus and exposure beforehand and then wait for the person to walk through the scene. And then I was ready to capture the perfect photo without having to worry about focus and exposure as the person pans through the photo.

Now, the next technique I want to talk about is taking HDR photos. HDR stands for high dynamic range. And it is a camera technique that allows you to take photographs where both the lights or bright parts of the image and the shadows or dark parts of the image are well exposed. Let me show you how this technique works with a quick video demonstration. Okay, right now you're looking at my iPhone again. And here we have the forest, which is quite dark. And we also have a relatively bright sky at the top. And shiny sand at the bottom of the screen.

So in terms of exposure, this is a challenging situation because we can't expose everything correctly. So either the sky and sand will be very bright or the forest will be very dark. So one solution for this is to enable HDR. Now, if you look at the left side of the screen, towards the bottom, you will see the letters HDR. And if you touch your finger there you will see that by default HDR is set to automatic. And you don't want to keep HDR on auto, because essentially that means the iPhone will decide whether you're using HDR or not.

And that's not ideal. Instead, you'll want to do it yourself. And you want to consciously decide whether HDR should be on or off. Now, for landscape photography and challenging photography situations where some parts of the image are much brighter than others, I recommend leaving HDR on, but for all other situations you can pretty much leave it off. But for this we're going to turn on HDR, and right now I'm going to take a photo and there happens to be a bird flying in the scene, so let me take a couple more photos. And now let me open the photos we just took by tapping my finger on the bottom right corner of the screen.

Now you can see that this photo we just took has the HDR icon next to it in the top left, and that's how we know this is the HDR version of the photo. Now, if we go to the left, you will see another photo that is practically identical, but this is not the HDR version. So my iPhone is set up so that every time I take a photo, it saves two versions of the same photo. One with HDR and one without and that's what I recommend doing and right now I'm going to show you how to set it up.

Okay, now as I continue to the left, you can see that I have another HDR photo, and here is the non-HDR version of that same photo. And what you can also see is that if we zoom in a little bit and zoom in on the HDR photo, you'll see that the forest is properly exposed and as you get closer, you can see more details of the forest. You can see that the trees are green, which is how they should look, rather than being completely black, and overall you can see a lot more detail in the forest, and the forest is properly exposed.

While if we go to the other photo that is not HDR, you will see that the forest is much darker and when you get closer there is less detail and in general you can see that the forest is little exposed, but in the HDR version, both the Forest and sand in the foreground are correctly exposed. As I said before, HDR is really useful in landscape photography. For example, here you can see an example of a landscape photograph. This one doesn't have HDR on, and if you look at the sky you'll see that there are quite a few overexposed areas in the sky that are essentially completely white areas and where we no longer see any detail, which we don't. something good in photography.

But now look closely at the sky as I switch to the HDR version of the same photo. And you'll see that the HDR version is exposed correctly and we don't have any problems with the exposure. And in general you can simply say that this photo is better exposed thanks to HDR. So here's another example. This is the non-HDR version of the photo. And here is the HDR version of the photo and as I said before, HDR is probably best used for landscape photography, but there are some drawbacks to using HDR. And if you now look at the grass in close-up, you'll see that it doesn't have as much detail and contrast as the non-HDR version had.

So if you look at the photo closely, pay attention to the grass on the left. I'm going to switch to the non-HDR version again and you'll see that this time the non-HDR version has more details and more contrast in the foreground. Which might actually be a good thing, but at the same time the sky is off, meaning it's totally white in the top left and that's not a good thing. So here you would have to make a creative choice about which version of the photos you would prefer, but no matter which version you like better, what you want to do is make sure that the iPhone always saves both the HDR and non-HDR versions of the images. for you.

And to do that, what you need to do is open your iPhone settings, scroll down until you find Photos and Photos. Camera, and then scroll down to the bottom and at the bottom of the screen you will find the option to keep the normal photo. And you want to make sure that this slider is on and if it is on, your iPhone will save both the HDR and the normal version of the photos you take using the HDR mode of your iPhone camera. Now, the next iPhone hidden camera feature I want to talk about is burst mode.

And this is really amazing. It's actually one of my favorite features of the iPhone's hidden camera. Let me take my iPhone and show you how burst mode works. So now what you're looking at is a beach scene and you can see that I've already set and locked the focus exposure on the sand where I know a person is approaching from the left. And what you can now see is that our subject, who is a person I don't actually know, is walking across the scene from left to right. And I'm trying to take some photos of the person, but the person will leave very soon and I will have lost the opportunity to take this photo.

And with human subjects walking around the scene, there's a pretty big difference in terms of when you press the shutter. Now what you want to do in photos like this is press the shutter when your subjects' legs are wide apart. Because for some reason that seems much more pleasing to human eyes. Whereas if the legs overlapped, that just doesn't look as good. And to do this it is quite difficult to press the shutter at the exact moment, especially since this person will disappear from the scene very soon and then I will not have time to take this photo again.

So what I do in situations like this, when it's important to get the moment right and when there's some kind of movement in the scene, I'm using burst mode. So to activate burst mode, what you do is tap and hold the shutter button, which is what I'm doing now. And you will see a bunch of photos being taken quickly and you will see the number next to the shutter button showing how many photos you have already taken. As you can see, I took 34 photos in a matter of seconds. And now let me open up the camera roll and let's take a look at these photos.

So at first you might think, "Oh, no 34 photos! How am I going to top that?" But it's actually very easy to do it. So here you can see that this is a burst photo that is actually 34 separate photos. And at the top you can select the selection option, and once you do, it will allow you to select your favorites, so you don't have to keep all 34 photos. And at the bottom of the screen. You can scroll through these photographs very quickly, until you find the ones you like. You will see that there is a photo where the iPhone has already placed a dot below the photo.

And this is usually the sharpest photo that the iPhone considers the best photo. But obviously the iPhone doesn't understand which photo looks best, so it just chooses the photo it knows is the sharpest, and what you can now do is select the photos you want to keep. So now I just tap my finger on the bottom right of this photo and you'll see that blue check mark appear, and that means I'm going to keep this photo. And this way you can go through all the photos and keep any that you want to keep and then discard everything else.

So I look for photos where the subject's legs are spread wide apart, because I think they look better visually. So I'm going to select these photos that I like and discard everything else. So once I find a photo I'm happy with, I'll simply tap the "OK" check mark and everything else will be discarded the moment I hit Done. So here I am making my final decisions. And before I throw everything out, I just want to make sure I keep the ones I like. And once I'm sure of that, I'll click Done at the top right. And I'm going to just stick with the five favorites.

And right now, everything else was just deleted, and I only have five photos and everything else is gone. So you don't have to worry about your iPhone being full of photos just because you took a photo in burst mode. But now let me show you some examples of iPhone photos I took using the burst mode feature. So here this first photo was taken on the same beach and once again we have a guy I don't know walking through the scene. And here I wanted to make sure that the subject is right in front of that path because he looks better visually and I wanted to make sure that the subject is in full progress.

And this is such a short moment and if I mess it up, I'll have to wait a long time until someone else comes into the picture and that's why I used burst mode here. And I took a bunch of photos and then I was able to point out one photo, where the composition is perfect and where the subject's legs are very far apart, which looks great in a photo like this. Here's another example of a photo I took using burst mode and obviously any type of action shot, sporting events or anything where there's a lot of movement is perfect for using burst mode.

And finally, here's an interesting burst mode photo I took recently. And here, a guy was apparently trying to take some photos by jumping with his girlfriend and unfortunately the girlfriend, and I don't know these people, but the girlfriend didn't know about burst mode, and the guy had to keep jumping for 20 times because the girlfriend could never get the photo exactly right. And I saw this keep happening and then I decided to take a photo of them by taking these jumping photos, and because I was using burst mode, I was able to get the exact exact moment the first time I took photos, while they had to.

Keep practicing this until you get the exact shot. So if you're doing any type of jump shots. You'll definitely want to use burst mode, and that way your subject won't have to jump another ten times until you press the shutter at exactly the right moment. Now, the next iPhone hidden camera feature I'll talk about is taking photos with the volume buttons. So let me show you what that looks like in a quick video. So here you can see I'm standing on the balcony of our office and I'm just going to take some photos to demonstrate how the volume button trigger works.

So the nice thing about this is that I can hold my iPhone like I would a normal camera, which is really convenient. And what I can do is just use the volume buttons on the side of the iPhone as a shutter release, and when I press the volume buttons, the photo is taken automatically. Now what I can also do is get very close to the surface, as you can see me doing right now, and if I rotate my hands I can still capture a photo and pressthe shutter easily, but the iPhone is not really close. to the surface.

And now, if you look closely at my arms, you'll see that I'm once again using the volume button shutter button to take photos. And this way I can press the shutter more easily while my iPhone is really close to the surface. Now, in case you're wondering why I hold my iPhone so close to the surface, here's why I do it. As you can see, I was able to create a pretty interesting and creative photo on the balcony of our office building so that you don't have to go too far or go to famous places to take photos. .

As long as you know what you're doing, you can take great photos with your iPhone no matter where you are, even if you're in your office, which is where I'm recording this video. So, as you can see now, placing my iPhone near wet surfaces is one of my favorite photography techniques, but to do it right, you definitely need to lock the focus and exposure, or else the iPhone will focus on the surface itself. and everything in the background will be out of focus. So you need to make sure you lock the focus and exposure, as I showed you before, but if you do this, you can take some truly extraordinary photographs.

For example, this photo I took with my iPhone 4S several years ago. This remains one of my favorite photos to this day, and the reason I'm showing it to you is that, as long as you know what you're doing, you don't need a fancy camera or even the latest iPhone to be able to take great photos. . And finally, the last technique I want to show you is taking photos with your headphones. Let me take you behind the scenes in our office and show you how this feature works. Okay, for feature number seven, I want to take you behind the scenes and show you the setup we had to record some of the earlier demos.

You'll see here that we have two studio lights. We have our flower as a theme. And because we have these lights so close to the flower, the flower is brightly lit, which makes the photo sharper and also allows me to demonstrate to you an effective exposure. And here we have the iPhone on a tripod. So that when you record the video the iPhone does not shake too much and, of course, when you use a tripod you will also get a sharper photo. Now, one of the problems that you have when you shoot with a tripod is that when you touch the screen to take a photo, the iPhone moves a little bit, or if you're going to use these volume buttons right here, then the iPhone is going to move even more.

And your goal in photography is to try to reduce the movement of your iPhone as much as possible so that you can get the sharpest photos possible. And the solution for this is to connect your Apple headphones. These are the white earbuds that come when you first buy the iPhone. If you just plug them in and open the camera app. What you can do then is take pictures using these volume buttons on the headphones of your iPhone. Right now, so I don't have to touch my iPhone screen, I can just press the volume buttons, either volume up or volume down, and it takes a photo every time I do.

And this is particularly useful when you're working on a tripod, or if you're doing street photography and want to blend in so other people don't even know you're taking a photo. Well, here's a quick example of a street photo I took using the volume buttons on my Apple headphones. I was actually pretending I was listening to music and I don't even know these people. They're strangers in New York City, but I saw this moment as potentially very interesting and so I pulled out my iPhone. And, while pretending to be listening to music, I could take a photo of these people without them realizing I was taking a photo.

And that is the reason why you can see sincere emotions on the faces of these people. And here is another example of the same thing. Here you can see a photographer selling photographs on the streets of San Francisco. And I was able to get pretty close to him, and he didn't even realize I was taking a photo even though he's a photographer and that's because I was pretending to be listening to music on my headphones, while I was actually taking a photo of him. this man using my Apple headphones. I hope you enjoyed the hidden camera features we talked about in this video.

These techniques have helped me take some of my best photos with the iPhone. And now that you know these techniques, you too can use them to take exceptional photos with your iPhone. That being said, this is just the beginning. There is a lot I can share with you in this short video. And although I didn't hide anything, there are many other techniques that I didn't have time to share with you today. And there is actually something even more important than any of the techniques we talked about. You see, the techniques we cover today are extremely powerful.

But the only way to really take your iPhone photos to the next level is by changing the way you look at the world around you. Some people say they don't have anything to take pictures of where they live, or that the iPhone can't take great pictures, but of course, none of that is true. There are amazing photo opportunities wherever you go. You just have to know how to use them. And that's exactly why I created iPhone Photo Academy, which is the only online course that will help you take amazing iPhone photos that everyone loves and that you'll be proud to look at years later.

Now, I must warn you that iPhone Photo Academy always sells out quickly and registration will only remain open for a few more days. Therefore, if you want to know more about this course, you should do so now while registration is still open. So go ahead and click on that big, funny looking yellow button below this video and it will take you to the next page where you can learn more about iPhone Photo Academy and see if this course is right for you before you sign up. It closes in just a few days. So go ahead, click the button below and I'll see you on the next page.