The Wild Photographer

How to Turn your Phone into the Best Camera in the World

• Episode 72

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Your smartphone is already the camera you carry everywhere — and in this episode, Court makes the case for why that can make it the best camera in the world. From smarter shooting shortcuts and better composition to long exposures, portrait mode, slow motion, and simple edits, this episode is packed with practical ways to get more out of the camera that’s already in your pocket. Court also shares which phone features he actually uses, which ones he skips, and a few favorite apps for shooting and editing on the go.

What You’ll Learn

  •  Why your phone can genuinely become your most useful camera 
  •  Quick access tricks that make it easier to capture fleeting moments 
  •  How to improve composition with aspect ratio choices and grid lines 
  •  When night mode, portrait mode, and live-mode long exposures shine 
  •  Why pinching to zoom can reduce photo quality
  •  How to think about editing for photos that will mostly live on phones 
  •  Which smartphone features are worth using — and which Court mostly ignores 

Talked about in the Episode: 

Leica LUX App

Lightroom Mobile App

Court's Websites

Sponsors and Promo Codes:


Court (00:00)
These smartphones of today are just incredible for photography. know I don't have to convince you that you are very likely using your own smartphone for a lot of photography, even if you have a big fancy camera to couple with it. In fact, that's really how I use it as a second body. It's my landscape lens in lot of cases. And this entire episode is dedicated to how to turn your phone into the best camera in the world. Now, I say that with a caveat because I still do

shoot with my big fancy camera. That's still my primary one, but there's a great saying in photography that the

best camera in the world is the one you have with you. And the reality is, is we have our phones with us way more than our bigger fancier cameras. And as a result, if you know how to use these things really well and take advantage of all the tools and the tricks and especially the tips I'm to give you today, it really elevates them to become honestly just great. Even primary cameras. know a lot of folks I go on trips with, they're using their phone for probably 70 % of their shots. And of course, depends on how you're going to use the photos afterwards. But

you can absolutely get away with a smartphone for so much of photography, lot of ad hoc photography, street photography, even landscapes and wildlife. is simply the best camera in the world because you always have it with you. Their sensors are getting better and better all the time. They're actually really amazing because they are small sensors. They actually give you an extraordinarily big depth of field.

So sometimes when I'm with people and wildlife in the same scene, because of these small sensors, I'm actually able to get a better, deeper depth of field shot, photographing the gorillas in the background with the people in the foreground, the breaching whales in the background with the people in the foreground, whatever it might be, because these sensors are so small, they actually give you a really big depth of field, like bigger than you could even get on a bigger fancier camera like at F16 and F22. So those depth of field considerations are really a big deal for using smartphones.

In addition, they have these great capabilities to give you very shallow depths of field. And we'll talk about that in today's episode. And one of the most important things is the photos you take from these things are just like instantly, or at least very easily shareable. And it gets you to use your work right away. That's one of, I think the big cruxes as cameras get more more complicated and you have to download them and they're big file sizes and you have to edit them is that it puts a barrier to entry in.

the time of you taking the photo and then doing something useful with it. And so I think the fact that they're on your phone you can instantly share it.

You can upload it. You can write a post. can put in your little phone journal. You can categorize albums and have great memory making from your trips really quite instantly, quite easily is a huge, huge benefit that I don't think we really take for granted, but it may not be for front of our mind as to why these things are so powerful for us. And like I said, they're getting better and better all the time. The sensors are getting bigger. The megapixel counts getting bigger. I think on the most recent iPhone, if you shoot in the raw mode, you're at like 48 megapixels. If you're in the normal JPEG,

or the small compression HEIC, you're at like 24. So it's just the photos are good. The sensors are good. Everything's really quite good. So in today's episode, I cover a lot ranging from shortcuts on buttons on the camera, like using your volume down to actually take photos when I use different zooms and how to take night photos and also how to get that blurry, silky water effect just on an iPhone or a smartphone.

I then end with certain settings and modes that I don't use to provide a little bit of clarity on, you know, some of the things that go really deep and really complex in these things that I actually just skip over and don't use, but I will talk about them. And then also editing techniques as well as some recommended camera and editing programs out there right on your phone. But before I dive in, I'd like to say a quick word of thanks to the sponsors of the show.

First up, wanna thank arthelper.com.

Art Helper's mission is to create a brighter future for human artists in the world of infinite AI content, Art Helper is no longer just a powerful tool set designed to assist artists in the distribution and promo of their work, something that I've been using with them for quite some time. It's really astounding what they do offer there. But it's also a professional networking community now for creators of human-made art. That's one of their real slogans here. And they help you with badges and all sorts of cool things to,

again, show it's human made art. It's really been a very energizing real time experience helping them build their platform and be part of their community. It's this feed of artwork discussions, critique and art world news all in their platform. And most importantly, it is free to join. So you go to art helper dot com slash sign up and check out their amazing art communities. ⁓

the wild photographer in there and some other channels that I have like all about wildlife photography, landscape photography, storytelling photography, I think you're gonna really like those things too.

So once again, arthelper.com check it out today.

Next up, I'd like to talk about something that every photographer bumps into sooner or later. That moment when you start eyeing your next piece of gear. Maybe it's because your style is evolving. Maybe a lens just isn't cutting it anymore. Or maybe there's something new on the market that caught your eye for an upcoming trip. Whatever it is, the upgrade cycle is very real. And that's where MPB comes in. MPB is hands down one of the easiest ways I've found to buy, sell or trade camera gear without all the usual hassle

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Okay, let's get into the episode, how to turn your phone into the best camera in the world. So the first one, and I should say I've done this live in front of people on photo trips all the time and people just, no matter how experienced they are, they are learning a lot of new things here. And this is one that I particularly love. I'm starting off with this is that no matter what,

edition iPhone or smartphone you have you can use the volume down button as your shutter button. It is a game changer I know a lot of newer iPhones have an actual camera button and a shutter button built in and that's great I commend them for doing that it's nicely placed but since the very beginning of iPhones and still to this day if you open your camera you can hit the volume down button and all of a sudden you are now taking the shot this is huge because how many times have we been awkwardly holding our camera with our thumb and our pinky

and wrenching around our index finger or trying to use your nose to touch the shutter button because you need to have that touch sensor, having a real button goes a very, very long way. I absolutely love it. So again, volume down button for your shutter.

Now the thing is, is that in order to use this, you obviously have to have your camera open. And this is another one that I really like. Again, iPhone, all these smartphones have figured out easy ways to quickly access your camera. think on the latest iPhone operating system, you can now just tap the little camera button in the bottom of your home screen.

However, I have found a quicker way is that once you wake up your phone and you could do this right now or do it when you're done listening to the podcast, once you wake it up, meaning it's showing that hold screen, you're not on your actual app screen, you just wake it up and then swipe left on the screen. Just a nice, deliberate swipe left and that instantly accesses your camera.

It bypasses the face recognition and bypasses the password. So it's a really great thing if someone hands you their phone to take a photo of them and let's say it goes dark, it goes on hold or on lock.

You can wake it back up and access the camera just by swiping left on that hold screen or home screen, whatever you want to call it, and boom, there's your camera. It's pretty darn amazing.

The next thing I want to talk about is getting a little bit more into the weeds. And this is your aspect ratio. so aspect ratio means basically how many units long versus how many units tall is your ending shot. Like for instance, on most iPhones, they come default as a four to three ratio, meaning four units wide by three units tall. again, kind of like think about a four by six photo that you might have in your closet. So four by three is the default. ⁓

I don't particularly like that. And you may have noticed over the years that when you do this, and then when you want to share photos or you want to show photos on your screen, it's got the black bars and the top and bottom or left and right. It's not the whole screen.

the reason for doing this, I'm not sure why they start with a four by three because frankly, most bigger fancier cameras do a two to three ratio or three to two, know, either one if you're doing a portrait versus landscape orientation, but three units long by two units tall. And the reason for this, we'll go back in the history of photography for a brief second, is that when cameras were first invented, you know, quite some time ago, they determined that the way our human eyes see scenes, like any scene, is we're seeing them

on a three units wide by two units tall. Think about that because we have two eyes, we have binocular vision, we're seeing wider than tall. And the gist is is that back in the day it was determined that it was a three to two ratio and that's pretty good. So that's what most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have today. However...

A couple of decades ago, some engineers and some smart folks started digging into that three to two ratio as what the human eye actually sees. And the reality is it's actually a little closer to the ratio of 16 by nine. So it's not far off. That's pretty close to three to two, but it's a little bit more specific. So 16 units across by nine units tall. Now here's the funny thing is that if you've ever noticed the actual aspect ratio of HD movies,

you know, 1080 movies, your TV at home, your phone, they're all 16 by 9. And so not only is using a 16 by 9 ratio a little bit more accurate to what the eye sees, but also means that when you take a photo or a video or what have you, you're using the entire size of the screen. So you don't have those black bars. You're actually making use of the space you're given. So I think it's a huge benefit. Where exactly you find your aspect ratio definitely depends on whether you're an iPhone or an Android or Google or which edition

of iPhones, but basically it's usually right in your camera itself. Like for instance, I'm looking at my iPhone 16 right now and I just hit a little carrot that's a little, you know, top hat on the very bottom of my camera and it comes up and all of sudden I see this little circle.

And it says if I were on four to three ratio, I'm currently on 16 by nine because I always want to be on 16 by nine. But you get that little carrot, you swipe up and then you once you see that ratio, you hit it and then you have these other options. You can be on four by three. You can be on three by two. You can do one to one, which would be a square or you can do 16 by nine. And I highly recommend 16 by nine. Again, it makes use of that beautiful full screen of your camera. And it also is a little bit more like what the eye sees. So there's a win win. Now we're

going get further into the weeds here and we're going to skip to a tip, a topic called Preserve Settings. Now this is a very iPhone centric setting thing here, but I know every other phone camera manufacturer has this in some way. But basically if you go into your settings menu of your camera, meaning you have to go to your iPhone settings and then find the little app that says camera, you will notice that there is a toggle on or a button somewhere that says Preserve

settings.

Now what this is going to allow you to do is you can toggle on different kinds of settings that are preserved from every time you close down your phone, close down your camera and open it back up. So the important thing here, the reason I'm pairing it with this aspect ratio is that if you change your aspect ratio, like I'm suggesting to 16 by nine and you close your camera down, you pick it up in an hour, it's going to magically go back to four to three, you know, unfortunately. However, there's this really easy thing again in the camera app menu is you can hit preserve settings and you'll see like

five different choices of what things to preserve between shots. instance, you can toggle on something that says.

use the very last settings that I used, meaning if I was on a photo and I was using the 16 by 9 ratio, it's going to save that. There's another one that allows you to preserve whether you keep it on the last camera mode, meaning if you had it on video last, it'll stay on video. If you had it on portrait photos last, it'll stay on portrait. So I recommend going into your camera app settings. Again, it's navigated by the settings menu on iPhone and play around with those preserve settings because I think it's a really, powerful tool to just make it simpler, easier.

build that muscle memory of what settings and what styles you like the most and not have to redo it every time you access your camera.

So the next thing I want to talk about is how to take night photos. And this is pretty darn simple. So you just open your camera up like you normally would, which now means swiping left on the hold screen, of course, if you're if you're adopting my techniques here. But once your camera is open.

and you're in low light, maybe it's the blue hour just after the sun sets, maybe it's truly a nighttime photo and you're actually in front of something amazing like the Milky Way or the Aurora Borealis, is you simply hold your camera, point it at that thing, take the shutter, which again now you might use via the volume down button, and you just hold it until it tells you to stop holding it.

Court Whelan | The Wild Pho... (13:49)
And I should clarify when I say hold it, don't actually mean hold the button down the whole time, that'll switch it to video mode, but just hold your camera really still. That's what I mean by holding it.

Court (13:59)
And the iPhone figures out how dark it is versus how long you have to hold it. Sometimes it's two seconds,

Sometimes it's four seconds, sometimes it's longer, and then it merges all that data and it evens out your hand movement to do pretty well at getting night shots. Now, I will tell you, this is a common question I get of how to take night photos on an iPhone. This is how you do it. You just hold it there and you don't move it hold it still as you can, but they don't...

do anywhere near as well as if you're photographing on a bigger, fancier camera. And of course, I have entire episodes on how to get great night photos with DSLRs and mirrorless and the types of lenses and tripod use and all that sort of stuff. But this is a nice quick way, Maybe you're taking firework photos. Maybe you're just seeing a really nice kind of warm glow off the horizon and getting a blue hour shot. You know, I mentioned Milky Way. You're probably not going to get great Milky Way shots.

You can get great Aurora shots. I've seen it. I've guided trips and I've seen people right next to me getting beautiful shots. I would put it in this bucket. If you're taking night photos on an iPhone, they are shareable and textable, but they're not going to be anything you're going to hang on your wall.

There's just not enough quality there. ⁓ But nevertheless, I digress. That's how you do it. What I like doing with this similar technique more is actually taking daytime photos with the same slow shutter concept and using this long exposure technique I'm about to tell you about.

So what this allows you to do if you've ever been in front of a beautiful waterfall and the person next to you is using a big fancy camera and they get this beautiful silky waterfall effect where the water is like it almost looks like it's moving. It's not moving. It's one still photo, but the water is streaming where everything else around it is rock solid. It might literally be the rocks. It might be the people standing there. It might be the trees, the tropical forest, whatever it is, but the waterfall has this the silkiness to it. It's really fantastic.

So what you do, this is on an iPhone specifically, is you make sure your camera is on live mode for shooting. You're in front of that waterfall. You don't need any fancy filters like neutral densities like we normally would for bigger cameras. We take that shot. The word live is going to appear on your screen for probably one second, a little yellow box. You're going to hold your camera as still as possible until that is off. Okay, until that live mode goes off your screen. Then you're done taking the shot.

back into the photo, so click on the little bottom left of your screen where the photo appears, and then you're going to notice a little drop down menu on the top left of your screen. And you can now toggle between a few different modes. There's like some kind of fun social media bouncy type actions. There's a continuous action where it actually merges that one second of video that it's taking into a little movie. But what we're looking for here is long exposure.

So you take that shot, it is a long exposure because it is a one second live mode. When you toggle that down, it's going to think for a second, maybe a half a second, and it's going to merge those shots and it's going to give you that silky water effect. It's absolutely.

Incredible. Highly, highly recommend it. Long exposure. You can do this for anything that's moving. think water is probably the best thing, but sometimes if you're walking over like an overpass in a city and you want to showcase the traffic below and these like, it could be at nighttime with like the streaming headlights and tail lights could be in the daytime. I remember I took a shot like this a few years ago at an overwalk passing over a big highway in Bangkok, Thailand. And I wanted to show kind of the chaos of the tuk-tuks, the little bikes driving around in

cars and the people walking across the street in haphazard fashion. And I took this long exposure and it's this beautifully blended photo of all the motion in the scene. So it's not just for water, but that is what I often use it for. But think different, think beyond what could you show motion with in normal iPhone photos.

The next thing I'm talk about is portrait mode and I do love portrait mode. It is the way to get that shallow depth of field that very pro look to your photos. I don't use it all the time because you cannot use live mode on portrait mode. ⁓ It does not have the low light sensitivity like you would with night photos and these long exposures.

But it does force the camera into doing some digital manipulation to really blur the foreground and the background, meaning you have your subject and roll your scene. It might be a friend. It might be a couple. It might be a flower. It might be a butterfly that's landed on a leaf. And you hit this button and it does this magical thing where the subject is tack sharp.

but the background is really nicely blurred. And we photographers pay a lot of money to have that capability with our pro level cameras. You we're talking about very, very big apertures, very small F numbers, but you can do the same thing on a smartphone.

So the trick is to go to portrait mode and then one of the options is in your upper right hand corner you're going to have a little kind of like a cursive F and a slash. You can actually change the F number. You can change the aperture. It's usually by default set on like F 2.8 which is moderately shallow. That's pretty darn good but you can actually tap that and go all the way to the extreme end which is F 1.4 and get a remarkably shallow depth of field

Like the background is just completely melting away. And even the foreground too, you might have some trees in the foreground or brush. Everything other than the subject is tack sharp. So I love portrait mode.

The trick here, and this goes for all photography on smartphones, is that you do want to achieve the right focus. And in a busy scene, even though portrait mode should select your subject, the way to make sure of it is to hold your phone, frame your camera, tap the person, tap your subject in the screen, a little yellow box goes around it, and that's how you make sure that that is where it's focusing. It's not as important to do this with normal, just typical iPhone photos.

But for portrait mode, if you miss the focus, it's going to be very, very noticeable because of that big background separation. And then one other plus here is that once you tap on that focus point, you can swipe up to brighten the shot and down to darken the shot. And this is a really powerful tool for.

all smartphone photos. Swipe up to brighten, down to darken. This helps you adjust what we call exposure and this really just kind of creates the mood and the vibe that you want. You got to be careful with it because you don't want to overly brighten it just because you're looking at your screen in midday and you're like, I can't quite see it because the sun's shining. So you only want to do it when you know you want to manually brighten or darken. But I do use it quite often just to nail exposure. And it's just, you know, a couple of swipes up, a couple of swipes down. I can create that dark and moody look with some swipes

down, can create a real high key bright overexposed look if I want to be a little artsy. It's a very, very fun technique. And that's with portrait mode. That's with normal photo mode. That's live mode. That's, know, with any sort of different zoom lens that you have on the one times, the 0.5 times, the five times, et cetera. In fact, let's talk about that next.

I

I'd to take a quick break and thank Bayphoto and address the importance of printing your work. Because honestly, this is one of the simplest ways to elevate your photography and love what you do in the world of photography more. Bayphoto is one of the top professional photo labs in the country and their quality is absolutely next level. Having a lab like Bayphoto that you trust makes it so much easier to confidently order prints for yourself, order prints for gifts, for clients if you're at that point.

And one thing I really love is how intuitive their online ordering system is. It is built specifically for photographers and there are tools baked right in to help you visualize the final product. That includes things like custom wall previews. You can see what the print is gonna look like on your wall or on example walls. You can add a frame to it, see what that's gonna look like, a different color frame, light wood, dark wood, metal prints, et cetera.

It's pretty amazing. and on that topic, Bay Photo also offers an incredible range of print options. They do have metal prints, have acrylics, framed prints, canvas wraps, and so much more. Dozens of different types of pro quality paper to choose from, from things with high sheen to matte finish, you you name it. All made with top quality, sustainable materials and turnaround is very, very fast. And here's a great bonus for listeners of The Wild Photographer. You can now get 25 % off any one wall

display order with the promo code TWP25. So just head on over to bayphoto.com slash the wild photographer to create your next high impact print. And trust me, seeing your work printed beautifully changes everything. Okay. And now back to the show.

So I mentioned different zoom modes.

Here's the thing is that most modern smartphones have one, two, three lenses, usually two or three and the pro ones have three and they're fantastic. ⁓ I think generally the lower end of the zooms work better. Like my iPhone, if I use the five times, I am just not really happy with it to be totally frank. I hate to say that, but I liked the one time. I liked it two times. I used to have a three time zoom and those were great. But here's the real big takeaway. Not only is it, know, definitely try different zoom lenses, like definitely try the point.

.5 is your ultra wide. It's amazing because you can get so much more in the scene. It's like the equivalent of, I don't know, a 14 millimeter lens, which is really, really wide. Again, we pay a lot of money as pro photographers to get lenses like that. So to have that with just a click of a button in your smartphone is amazing. But the big thing here, my advice is don't pinch into your shot, meaning like don't zoom in with your fingers by just kind of pinching.

Use the lenses specifically like tap the one times tap the two times tap the five times because here's the thing if you zoom in it gives you this spectrum. So you might be at one point seven times zoom and the problem is what that does is it's using the one time zoom with digital zoom meaning it's it's cropping in digitally to give you what you're asking for

And so when I do want a little bit more zoom, I don't pinch in. will just manually select my two times. I'll manually select my four times or my five times. think now they have like eight times. If you start zooming in and going in between these lenses, you're using the lens below it. So again, if you're zooming in at like a two times and you want to go to two and a half times, you're using that two times lens and your digital zooming such as cropping the photo, it's reducing the quality. You'll notice it do some tests, go, back and forth. But while it's very easy and it's nice because

because then you can compose your shot, can frame your shot. It's kind of fun to pinch and zoom. I highly recommend training yourself to not do that. Instead, just manually selecting with your finger the one times. If you need more zoom, tap the two times. If you need the five times, tap the five times and don't pinch and zoom because you'll often end up between those lenses

just maximizing the capability.

and the sharpness and the quality of each of those three individual lenses. You want to stick with the native resolution. You want to stick with the native millimeter and focal length of each of those lenses.

While we're on the topic of the lenses themselves, this is just a quick note. Your back camera...

is better than your front camera. Like if you are looking at your screen and pointing away from you where you have those two little lenses, those three lenses, that is a significantly higher quality shot

if you were to swap around and use your little selfie camera. The selfie camera is nice. It's great because you can see yourself, you can see your family, know, whomever you're photographing, it's quite nice.

but just know that the camera that is on the back of your phone is significantly higher quality. Like those lenses are better. So sometimes, you we might be just kind of shortcutting it and we might be with ⁓ our spouse in front of some sort of sculpture in the city or trying to take a street scene as we're walking down the avenue. And we just do a quick little selfie and a stranger says, Hey, do you want this photo? Can I take it for you? You know, it's up to you if you want to entrust them with your camera. But if you do, and then they use now the back camera,

the back lens, it's going to be a significantly better photo, irrespective of their own photo abilities. Maybe they don't take great photos, but nevertheless, just keep that in mind. Your back camera is better than the selfie camera. It's it's not as good of a lens. And you can imagine that, right? Like the lens, if you look at it it's very small compared to those bigger lenses in the back. But now, you know, if you want the utmost quality, use the back lenses.

Another thing I want to advise is turning on your grid of your camera. And this is a really nice tip. You can do so in the systems menu. This goes for iPhone. This goes for Android. It's in the actual system settings of the app itself. And there'll just be a little toggle button that says grid. And you may wonder when what is that? Oftentimes, fortunately nowadays, these things are turned on automatically, but just a little tick tack toe board over your screen. And this basically allows you to visualize your shots in the rule of thirds. And remember, we want to place subject

at one of the four intersecting points. We want to have people looking into the open space.

We don't want to place horizons right at the middle at 50-50. We want to place it at the upper third or the lower third. And getting that grid on your screen just helps, A, remind you, but also get you pretty specific so you adhere to the rule of thirds very, very accurately. I love it. It gets me to think about it. It gets me to compose my shots a little bit better. I will always think outside the box and I will always break the rule of thirds. But I do think

In general, if you're not used to seeking and creating balance in your shots through more advanced compositional techniques, having that rule of thirds grid is fantastic.

So I want to make a quick note on video and slow-mo because they are also part of the power of these cameras. ⁓ Quick note on video, you know, the rules of video when it applies to smartphones kind of go outside the window, especially if you're...

prioritizing photographing and videoing for social media. You know, there was a day when I would advise people, you know, don't move the camera, hold on your scene for five to 15 seconds. you know, look at that time signature or count one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand to five to 15 seconds. You know, don't zoom in, don't pan, don't move your camera because it's distracting. However, again, all that flies out the window because nowadays these quick social media clips, you almost need that movement in your scene to kind of grab the view.

viewers attention in the what first one or two seconds. So the main note I'm going to give you on video is not necessarily how to do it because there are a lot of different techniques out there. But I wanted to distill down the difference between video and cinematic mode. Most phone cameras now have a second video option known as cinematic mode. And the cool thing here, I don't use it very often because if I'm trying to film a video, I'm probably going to use a fancier camera. However, cinematic mode is like portrait mode for video. So meaning you can

can

control that depth of field. You can get that really shallow look and it just makes it more cinematic. It looks like you have a more professional camera. So if you're the kind of person that's going out on a big kind of epic photo trip and you want to take video and you want to you want to make a little YouTube video out of it. You want to make some pro looking level videos whether it's for social or otherwise cinematic mode is a nice way to do that and it still keeps all your automatic settings, but you have control of that aperture. So again, you can make a very very shallow depth of field to give that portrait look to moving pictures to video.

And the second thing on video is don't ignore the slow mo option. Slow motion is beautiful. It's so fun. My quick caveat there is that, you know, pretty much anything looks good in slow mo, but it depends on which slow mo speed you set. in the upper right hand corner, at least of iPhones, you can toggle between 240 and 120 frames per second. OK, so 240 versus 120. That means you're either getting 10 times slow motion, like you're slowed down 10 times if you're at 240.

or you are slowed down about five times at 120. Whether you use one or the other very much depends on the speed of the thing you're filming. Like I was just down photographing and filming the monarch butterfly migration and these butterflies are frenetic. They're going all over the place. They're flying fast. They're darting in 240. That 10 times slow mo is fantastic. Now if I'm out on the tundras of Churchill and I'm filming two polar bears sparring or I'm watching brown bears fish for salmon in Alaska,

I'm going to be on 120 frames because the 240 is just too slow. It's too boring. Because remember, if you take two seconds of real time video, that turns into 20 seconds at 10 times slow mo. So the 120 frame, five times slow mo is about ideal for wildlife in general in my mind. But if you're trying to film, you know, people jumping off of diving boards or race cars or birds in flight or monarch butterflies, things that are hyper fast, hummingbirds, great example.

240 is great. Otherwise, I really like 120 to be totally honest. It's like halfway slow-mo. It's not the crazy slow-mo we're used to, but it's a really nice balance. So just get used to toggling that there. I think it's a lot of fun.

And then the final tip here, I already mentioned this, but when you do record video, only record a couple of seconds at a time. Nobody wants, you you're going to be filming whatever thing is in front of you and you're going to take 10 or 15 seconds because that's what's happening in real time. And you want to capture this whole thing that turns into like a couple of minutes of video and nobody wants to sit and watch through a couple of minutes of slow-mo. So just do yourself a favor, ⁓ film multiple times, like take many different batches, but start and end, you know, start and cut within two to three seconds at a time.

And just be disciplined, force yourself to not go longer than three seconds. Because again, on full 10x slow-mo, that's 30 seconds of video. That's a long time to look.

Okay, so this is the part where I'm going to go over some other considerations, questions you may have, much

of which I don't mess with. So one is shooting in RAW. So the newer iPhones now give you the ability to photograph in RAW mode. on one thought, this might be kind of game changing. You're bumping up your megapixels from like 24 megapixels to 48. Like, wouldn't you want that? And it does give you a lot more editing capability. It does give you a bigger file size. It's probably a better photo in the end. However,

A, you have to edit it. So you got to be pretty adept at editing or want to edit every single photo. And, you know, usually you're going to have to edit on your phone, which is a little bit tedious, but really just from my POV, like just telling you what I do and what I think, like if I'm going to shoot in raw and edit a photo and I really want something to be very, very good, I'm going to use my bigger camera. My iPhone is my quick camera. It's my social media camera. It's my quick memories. It's my, texting, my email camera. Um, and I'm not wanting to manipulate the photo very, very much.

We will talk about editing in a second. I do edit some photos. But when we think about raw editing, because a raw file comes out very flattened, less sharp, less contrast, not as great of lighting. It just doesn't look like a finished product. I personally just don't mess with it on my phone. I'm going to break out my big camera if I want that.

The next thing is color modes and profiles. we see this on our phones like vivid versus standard versus landscape versus warm versus cool. And you know, they're kind of like Instagram filters. It's really up to you. If you like the look of a cool blue tone or a dramatic tone, that is up to you. ⁓ I think it's harder to change this after the fact when you do shoot in these compressed files like JPEG or HEIC, like the iPhone compressed file storage. However, you know, I just keep it on

Standard or maybe neutral or something that's kind of middle-of-the-road there have been times that I put it on like a little bit more of a saturated version But I don't stick with that usually because I can edit a little more saturation or contrast whereas I really can't take that away once it's shot into one of the modes same thing goes for the portrait You're gonna see like natural light and studio light. It's just again I don't really mess with that you can bring out so much more drama so much more intrigue so much more interesting stuff in the

edit of a photo versus taking it in one of these modes at the outset. The one caveat here that I really like is the black and white. Like I actually love the dramatic kind of black and white. It's actually if you're scrolling through on your iPhone, it's the second black and white, which is like really, really strong and very contrasty. And what I often do is when I'm walking around in the city, maybe I fly into Cuching Borneo to prep for a trip that I'm guiding is I'll walk around the city for, you know, my couple hours after I land to stretch the legs and

get out, get a little bit of exercise, and I'll just throw my camera in black and white for the whole thing. And again, because I've gone in preserved settings, like I told you about earlier, every time I open my camera, it's going to be saved on black and white. And I like forcing myself to do this because it's just, it's a really cool way to see the world. You're going to look in the back of your camera and you're going to notice tones and saturations in a very, different way. So that's kind of the one.

exception that I use is like, do like throwing my camera in black and white just to force myself to see different and do different. And some of these photos are honestly some of my favorite iPhone photos that I've ever taken to be totally frank.

People often ask me about additional accessories for iPhones and smartphones like lenses, macro lenses, zoom lenses. And again, I don't personally use them. ⁓ I have been around people that use them and I see how they have to attach them and they look very cumbersome. And I don't think the quality is super high. I know there's some great folks out there, some great companies that are making very high quality lenses for iPhones. I think honestly, by the time you spend the money on that,

I would recommend just getting a better point and shoot camera. Like let's say you aren't ready to make the leap to a big fancy DSLR or mirrorless, but you know, by the time you buy an extra shutter button, that Bluetooth to your camera, and then, you know, a macro lens and a zoom telephoto lens, and you have to screw these things on and clamp them on with like a little clothes pin. And then what happens if they fall? Is this glass? They break, you know, blah, blah, blah. I just think spending a couple hundred bucks on a good point and shoot is probably going to serve you better, which already does all the macro. It does the telephoto.

So I'm not hating on them. If you have them and you like them, ⁓ great. That's awesome. Like use the tools that you have available. It's fantastic. But I'm not going to go out and like recommend them as this game changing thing for iPhone photography.

So before we get into the editing section, I wanna turn you onto a really cool photo app that I found and it's called the Leica.

Lux app. So L E I C A just like the camera, like the very high end camera. The Leica Lux app is pretty darn cool. I've been having a lot of fun with it. I use it for a lot of photography. I think it gives me more creative tools that are a little bit easier to use than smartphone settings. I won't go as far to say it's been a game changer for me, but it's one of these things where it allows me to save camera settings a little bit easier. So let's say I want to shoot in color photos.

during the day, but also have a really, really easy way to shoot in black and white. can set my Leica app to black and white and then my iPhone to full color or, you know, I can add some really interesting, you know, grainy filters in the Leica app to give this kind of vintage camera look. I do like it. Yeah. And it's free. There is obviously paid things within the app. You can get different filters and all that, but of all camera apps that I've used over the years, other than my built-in camera app, which I frankly think is the best, like I don't use these pro photo apps and whatnot. I do think the Leica

app is probably the most fun, most intuitive, and it gives you that Leica look, which ⁓ you'll just have to see it for yourself.

Okay, so the final section here is editing your photos on smartphones. What do you do? How do you do this? ⁓ I think the real brilliance just to start off with is that you can edit these photos for the device, meaning that normally when we edit RAWs and even JPEGs on bigger, fancier cameras on the computer, we're kind of keeping in mind that we're editing for various different types of media. Like we have to edit this photo in case it goes into a magazine, in case it goes on a website, in case it goes on to an iPhone, in case it goes on to print. And as you can imagine,

looking at a photo on a backlit screen that could be at various different sizes.

it's not one size fits all like I have to be very very cognizant of how bright I keep my screen I have to be very cognizant of the colors on my screen Whereas if you are shooting on a phone and editing on a phone You're almost definitely gonna be sharing it and other people are gonna be seeing it on a phone and this is really nice because what you see is what you get meaning when you dramatically edit a photo on your phone you can you can push it as far as you can as long as it still looks good in your phone, whereas

if

I'm on my computer and I'm over saturating something I might have to constantly think well what if this thing gets shrunk down in size or what if it gets blown up in size on the phone however much you want to edit whatever you want to edit if it looks good to you you know

The vast, vast majority of other people are seeing it in very, similar way on their phone at a similar size, with similar colors, with similar backlighting versus print, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I really like that. ⁓ In short, you know, I think the normal camera editing app is great. I often mess with exposure for people photos in challenging lighting conditions. I'll mess with shadows. I do like a little bit of contrast. I like a little bit of vignette if I want to create a little bit of a dark circle around the photo to kind

draw your attention to the middle and then yeah some vibrance and some saturation I might mess with white balance but

You know, these are all things that are pretty simple. ⁓ I'm not going to do them for every photo, but it's all the standard things. So there's, know, a dozen different things, dozen plus that I'm going to use. The one thing I'm really not going to use a lot of is sharpening. I'm very, very hesitant to sharpen on a phone because it does degrade it very, very quickly. But the other thing you can do or consider is if you are really going all in on smartphone photography is you can get a subscription to Lightroom or let's say you already have Lightroom on your computer, you can download

it as part of your Adobe subscription already and you can download it for your phone. And let me tell you, Lightroom for your phone is spectacular. You can create the same masks, you can create brush edits where you just take your finger and brush over the parts that you want to be higher contrast or a little bit brighter, a little bit darker. It's really, really good. Like they've engineered this thing extremely well. So Lightroom for your phone, if you want the best editing app, that's it. ⁓ If you want a decent editing app,

The thing that's in your phone already is really quite fine. I think the brilliance of your phone is you're not going to need to edit. You're telling a more real story. more probably frankly about capturing the moment in your phone versus creating some huge piece of art that you're going to blow up to 24 by 36. And so that's why, know, again, these things can become the best camera in the world because you have them with you. You can capture those moments. It's really about just burning into your brain.

Don't be afraid to take out your camera. Take that shot. Take a couple of extra shots. Spend some time in the evening, you know, every day of your trip or even every day of your life going through the photos you've taken that day and curating them. This is one final point I want to make is that creating a quick way to go back to photos you've taken is a great, great thing. It's a great time investment. The smartphones, they're getting pretty good at

doing these smart albums and showing you, you know, memories from this day, this year, like that's all that's all good. But if you can spend like five, 10 minutes a day, even, you know, let's say not every day of the year, but the days where you're going to the festival, you're going to the concert, you're going to the great dinner, you're going out in the boat for the day. You're going on this big hike in the Rocky Mountains. Spend some time putting those 10, 20 photos in an album and culling them down a little bit, because it's just it's such a wonderful way to look back on your memories. If you

you provide, really provide yourself with the gift of organization. I'll end with that point.

Okay, folks, well, that's a whole lot about smartphone photos. ⁓ Couple little plugs I wanna give for you as well is I've started really doubling down on my editing YouTube videos. So if you would like to learn and really follow along in my own editing process for...

Again, bigger, fancier cameras. This is not for iPhone stuff. You've already heard that I don't do a lot of editing on iPhones. But if you do shoot and raw you want to see in real time within about five minutes how I take a starting photo and get it to the end. You're going to hear not only the things that I'm doing and see the things that I'm doing, but you're going to hear my thought processes of why I might want to experiment with like a really, really strong contrast here or why I might want to actually back off on D Hayes here, why I might want to mess with the S curve for contrast or, you know,

how to make shortcuts and different masks and all sorts of stuff. if you head on over to youtube.com slash @courtwhelan that's where you find me.

and yeah, it would mean a lot to hear from you over there. So I try to post all these episodes on YouTube within due time. ⁓ the quickest way is usually to be on the podcast app. But if you head on over to YouTube, that's probably the best way nowadays to drop me a comment on an episode. ⁓ doesn't even have to be the same episode that I'm talking about. If you have a comment on this episode and want to put it into an older podcast episode, I'll see it. I'll respond to it and I would love to hear from you. So once again, thanks so much folks for joining and I hope you have a fun time out there.

Shooting with your smartphones. Best camera in the world, right? Cheers.


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Court Whelan

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