Use the telephoto lens for portraits, not just the standard wide lens for a more natural look.
Your Face Isn’t a Funhouse Mirror
Imagine taking a picture of a friend with the regular wide lens by getting really close. Notice how their nose seems to get bigger and their face looks a bit stretched, like a reflection in the back of a spoon? Now, take a few steps back and switch to the telephoto lens (the 2x or 3x option). It’s like using a pair of binoculars to bring your friend closer without physically moving. Suddenly, their features look balanced and natural, just like how you see them in real life. That’s the magic of the telephoto lens for portraits; it captures people, not caricatures.
Stop using the digital zoom. Do move closer to your subject instead to maintain image quality.
Don’t Stretch the Truth
Think of your photo as a beautiful, detailed painting. Using digital zoom is like standing far away from the painting and stretching a small section of it to make it look bigger. What happens? The paint strokes become a blurry, pixelated mess. All the fine details are lost. Instead, imagine you are physically walking closer to the painting. You see every intricate brushstroke with perfect clarity. Moving your feet to get closer to your subject is the same idea. It keeps your photo sharp and clear, preserving the quality instead of creating a fuzzy, disappointing imitation.
Stop relying on the flash for low-light photos. Do use Night mode instead for clearer, more atmospheric shots.
Capturing the Campfire, Not Just the Firefly
Using the flash in a dark room is like shining a harsh spotlight on a single actor on a huge, dark stage. You see them, but everything else—the beautiful set, the other actors, the mood—is plunged into blackness. It’s startling and unnatural. Night mode, however, is like slowly turning up the stage lights. It gathers all the available ambient light, gently brightening the entire scene. You see not just your friend’s face but also the cozy, warm glow of the room around them, capturing the true feeling of the moment without the harsh, deer-in-the-headlights look.
The #1 secret for cinematic video on your iPhone is locking the focus and exposure, which pros don’t want you to know.
Don’t Let Your Camera Get Distracted
Imagine you’re filming a friend telling an important story in a busy café. Without locking focus, your camera is like a distracted person, its attention constantly darting around. It focuses on your friend, then a person walking by, then the bright window, causing the brightness and sharpness to flicker annoyingly. It ruins the moment. By long-pressing on your friend’s face until the “AE/AF LOCK” box appears, you’re telling your camera, “This is the star of the show. Don’t look at anything else.” The focus and lighting stay steady, creating a smooth, professional, and cinematic shot.
I’m just going to say it: The stock Camera app is more powerful than 99% of third-party camera apps for the average user.
Your Kitchen Has All the Right Tools
Thinking you need a complicated third-party camera app is like believing you need a professional chef’s kitchen just to cook a delicious meal. The truth is, your standard kitchen is already equipped with a great stove, a sharp knife, and quality pans—everything you truly need. The iPhone’s built-in Camera app is just like that. It has powerful features like Portrait mode, Night mode, and ProRAW seamlessly integrated. For most of us, mastering these amazing built-in tools will create far more beautiful photos than getting lost in a labyrinth of confusing settings in a specialized app.
The reason your iPhone photos look grainy is because you’re not manually adjusting the ISO in a third-party app.
Like Turning Up the Volume on a Faint Whisper
Imagine you’re in a quiet room, trying to record a very faint whisper. The ISO on your camera is like the sensitivity setting or volume knob on your microphone. In low light, your iPhone automatically cranks up this “volume” to capture any light it can find. The problem? Just like a microphone turned way up, it also picks up a ton of background hiss and static. That’s what grain is. Using a manual camera app to lower the ISO forces the camera to be less sensitive, resulting in a cleaner, less “hissy” image, even if it’s darker.
If you’re still shooting in the default JPEG format, you’re losing massive amounts of editing flexibility available with ProRAW.
Baking a Cake vs. Decorating a Store-Bought One
Shooting in JPEG is like buying a pre-baked cake from a store. You can add some frosting and sprinkles on top, but you can’t change the flavor or ingredients inside. ProRAW, on the other hand, is like having all the raw ingredients for the cake right in front of you: the flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate. You have complete control to bake an entirely new creation. You can adjust the brightness, colors, and details in your photo with incredible precision after you’ve taken it, without losing any of the original quality, giving you limitless creative possibilities.
The biggest lie you’ve been told about iPhone photography is that you need expensive third-party lenses.
Stop Blaming the Pen for Your Handwriting
Believing you need extra lenses to take great photos is like an aspiring writer thinking they need a fancy, expensive fountain pen before they can write a good story. But the story comes from the writer, not the pen. Your iPhone’s built-in lenses are already incredibly high-quality and versatile. The real magic comes from learning how to see the world around you: finding interesting light, composing a beautiful shot, and capturing a compelling moment. Focus on mastering the powerful tool you already have in your pocket, and your photography will improve more than any lens could ever promise.
I wish I knew about the rule of thirds grid overlay in the camera settings when I was first starting out.
Your Canvas’s Hidden Blueprint
Imagine a painter staring at a blank canvas. Where do they start? The rule of thirds grid is like a secret blueprint for creating a masterpiece. Turning it on in your camera settings places two horizontal and two vertical lines over your screen, creating nine equal squares. Instead of just plonking your subject right in the center box, try placing them where the lines intersect. It’s a simple trick that instantly makes your photos more balanced, dynamic, and visually interesting. It guides the viewer’s eye through the image, turning a simple snapshot into a compelling composition.
99% of iPhone users make this one mistake when recording video: shooting vertically for horizontal platforms.
The Square Peg in a Round Hole Problem
Imagine filming a beautiful, wide sunset. You hold your phone vertically, capturing a tall, skinny slice of the scene. It looks fine on your phone screen. But then you go to watch it on your widescreen TV or laptop. Suddenly, you have massive, ugly black bars on either side of your video, and the grand, sweeping sunset is trapped in a tiny vertical box. It’s like trying to fit a skyscraper into a shoebox. By simply turning your phone sideways, you match the shape of the screens we watch on, filling them with your beautiful footage.
This one small action of wiping your camera lens before shooting will change the quality of your photos forever.
Looking Through a Dirty Window
Imagine trying to enjoy a breathtaking mountain view, but the window you’re looking through is covered in smudges, fingerprints, and dust. The majestic scene becomes a hazy, soft, and blurry mess. That’s exactly what happens when you take a photo with a dirty iPhone lens. Your phone lives in your pocket and hands, constantly collecting oils and lint. Taking just one second to wipe the tiny lens with a soft cloth is like cleaning that window. Suddenly, the view is crisp, clear, and vibrant. This simple habit is the easiest and most impactful trick in photography.
Use Photographic Styles for a consistent look, not Instagram filters after the fact.
Choose Your Film Before You Shoot
Think of old-school film photographers. They had to choose their film roll—like a vibrant color film or a moody black and white one—before they started shooting. Photographic Styles on your iPhone works the same way. You can choose a style like “Rich Contrast” or “Vibrant” that gets applied intelligently as you take the photo, preserving skin tones while enhancing the scene. It’s like choosing your special film stock to create a consistent look across all your pictures. Instagram filters are just slapped on top afterwards, often looking artificial and destroying the original data of your image.
Stop tapping to focus. Do a long press to lock AE/AF Lock instead for consistent shots.
Telling Your Dog to “Stay”
Tapping to focus is like pointing out a squirrel to your dog. It looks at it for a second, but then its attention immediately wanders to a bird, a car, or another person. Your camera does the same thing, constantly refocusing and re-evaluating the light. This causes a distracting “breathing” effect in your photos and videos. A long press on your subject until you see “AE/AF LOCK” is like firmly telling your dog to “Stay!” It locks both the focus (AF) and the exposure (AE) onto that single spot, ensuring your subject remains sharp and the lighting stays consistent.
Stop just taking photos. Do shoot Live Photos instead to capture unexpected moments.
A Photo with a Secret Story
A regular photo is like a single, frozen moment in time—a person smiling for the camera. A Live Photo, however, is like a tiny little memory keeper. It captures the 1.5 seconds before and after you press the shutter. You didn’t just capture the posed smile; you also caught the genuine laugh right before it and the playful wink right after. It’s the secret story behind the picture. Later, you can even go back and choose a different frame from that little video clip as your main photo, often discovering a more candid and perfect moment you thought you missed.
The #1 hack for smooth video is enabling “Enhanced Stabilization,” a feature most users don’t know exists.
Your Camera’s Invisible Hoverboard
Imagine trying to film while walking down a bumpy cobblestone street. Without stabilization, your video will look like a shaky, nauseating mess, just like your view would be if you were actually there. Standard stabilization is like having good walking shoes; it helps a little. But enabling “Enhanced Stabilization” (in your camera settings under “Record Video”) is like giving your camera its own invisible hoverboard. It intelligently crops in slightly on the image to create a buffer zone, smoothing out all those jarring bumps and shakes, resulting in incredibly fluid, gliding footage.
I’m just going to say it: Portrait mode often looks fake and over-processed.
A Bad Haircut for Your Photo
Portrait mode is supposed to be like using a professional camera to get that beautiful, blurry background. When it works, it’s amazing. But often, it’s like giving your photo a bad, digital haircut. The edges around your subject’s hair look weirdly cut-out, an earring might get accidentally blurred into the background, or the space between their arm and body stays sharp. It can look artificial and distracting. Sometimes, a beautiful, natural photo taken with the telephoto lens without portrait mode looks far more professional and timeless than one with a fake, over-processed background.
The reason your slow-motion videos look dark is because you’re not shooting in a well-lit environment.
A Camera That Blinks Very, Very Fast
Imagine your camera’s shutter is like your eyelid. To create a normal video, it blinks at a regular speed. But to create slow-motion, it needs to blink incredibly fast to capture many more frames per second. Each “blink” is so quick that it only lets in a tiny sliver of light. If you’re in a dimly lit room, there’s just not enough light for those super-fast blinks to capture a bright image. That’s why slow-motion videos look dark and grainy indoors. To get beautiful, bright slow-motion, you need a ton of light, like being outside on a sunny day.
If you’re still using the front-facing camera for important videos, you’re losing significant video quality.
The Side Mirror vs. The Windshield
Using your front-facing selfie camera to film an important video is like trying to drive your car while only looking in the small, distorted side-view mirror. It gets the basic job done, but the view is narrow, lower quality, and just not the best representation of the world. The rear-facing cameras, however, are like your car’s big, crystal-clear windshield. They have better sensors, superior lenses, and more advanced processing power. For any video that truly matters, turning the phone around to use the main cameras will give you a dramatically sharper, richer, and more professional-looking result.
The biggest lie you’ve been told about the iPhone camera is that more megapixels always mean better photos.
A Bigger Bucket Doesn’t Mean Better Water
Believing more megapixels are always better is like thinking a bigger bucket will automatically give you cleaner water. Megapixels are just the “buckets” that collect light to create your photo. What’s far more important is the quality of the light they’re collecting and the size of the camera’s sensor (the “opening” the water flows through). A camera with a larger sensor can gather more light and information, producing a cleaner, more detailed image, even with fewer megapixels. It’s the quality of the ingredients, not just the size of the bowl, that makes the final dish delicious.
I wish I knew that you could use the volume buttons as a shutter when I was struggling to take selfies.
The Secret Button You Already Know How to Use
Remember the feeling of trying to take a selfie? You’re holding the phone with one hand, stretching your arm out, and then awkwardly trying to contort your thumb to tap the on-screen button without dropping your phone. It’s a clumsy, shaky mess. Discovering you can just click the physical “volume up” or “volume down” button to take the photo is a game-changer. It feels as natural as using an old point-and-shoot camera. Your grip is more stable, you’re not fumbling, and you can focus on your smile instead of your thumb’s gymnastics.
99% of people make this one mistake when shooting panoramas: moving too quickly.
Painting a Landscape with a Single Brushstroke
Taking a panorama is like painting a sweeping landscape on a canvas, but you only get one continuous brushstroke. If you move your arm too quickly, the paint gets smeared and blotchy, and the lines don’t match up. The same thing happens when you rush a panorama with your iPhone. The software needs time to “see” the scene, stitch the images together seamlessly, and align all the details. By moving slowly and steadily along the guide line, you are giving the camera the time it needs to paint a perfect, seamless, and breathtaking view without any weird glitches or breaks.
This one small habit of using Burst Mode for action shots will ensure you never miss the perfect moment.
Fishing for the Perfect Moment with a Net, Not a Hook
Trying to capture the perfect action shot—your friend jumping into a pool or your dog catching a ball—with a single tap is like trying to catch a specific fish with a single hook. Your timing has to be absolutely perfect, and you’ll probably miss. Burst Mode, activated by holding down the shutter button, is like throwing a giant net into the water. It captures a rapid-fire sequence of photos in a split second. Then, you can calmly go through the “net” of photos later and pick out the one perfect, epic moment you would have almost certainly missed.
Use the exposure compensation slider, not just tapping on a dark area to brighten your photos.
Using a Dimmer Switch Instead of an On/Off Button
When a photo looks too dark, our first instinct is to tap on a dark part of the screen to brighten it up. This is like flicking a light switch—it brightens everything, but it often blows out the highlights, making the bright parts of your image a featureless white mess. The exposure compensation slider (the little sun icon that appears when you tap to focus) is like a dimmer switch. It gives you precise, fine-tuned control. You can brighten the shadows just enough without overexposing the highlights, creating a perfectly balanced and beautiful exposure.
Stop editing your photos directly in Instagram. Do use the built-in Photos app editor instead for non-destructive edits.
Writing on Your Photo in Pen vs. Pencil
Editing a photo in Instagram is like writing on your original, one-of-a-kind photograph with a permanent marker. Once you apply a filter and save it, the original image is gone forever, replaced by the edited version. You can’t undo your changes. The built-in Photos app editor, however, works like a pencil. It’s “non-destructive,” meaning it always preserves your original photo. You can make all the edits you want—adjusting light, color, and more—and at any time, even weeks later, you can hit “Revert” and get your pristine original back, completely untouched.
Stop shooting video in 4K if you don’t have a 4K display. Do shoot in 1080p to save space instead.
Buying a Huge Book You Can’t Read
Shooting all your videos in 4K is like buying every book in a giant, beautifully printed hardcover edition, even though you only have a tiny backpack to carry them in. A 4K video file is massive; it eats up your phone’s storage at an incredible rate. But here’s the secret: unless you are watching it on a huge 4K TV, you can’t even see the extra detail. Shooting in 1080p is like buying the high-quality paperback version. It looks fantastic on your phone screen, is way easier to share, and leaves you plenty of space for more memories.
The #1 secret for professional-looking iPhone videos is using an external microphone.
Your Ears Don’t Have a Zoom Lens
Imagine watching a beautifully shot video of your friend from across a park, but all you can hear is the roaring wind, a barking dog, and distant traffic. Your camera’s lens can zoom in to make your friend look closer, but its built-in microphone can’t. It picks up every sound from every direction. An external microphone, even a small one that clips onto your friend’s shirt, is like having a direct audio line to them. Suddenly, their voice is crisp, clear, and front-and-center, making your video feel ten times more professional and watchable.
I’m just going to say it: Most iPhone gimbals are a waste of money for casual users.
Learning to Walk Before You Try to Fly
Buying a gimbal before you’ve mastered basic stabilization techniques is like buying a complex robotics kit when you haven’t learned to build with simple blocks yet. The iPhone’s built-in stabilization is already incredibly powerful, especially the “Enhanced Stabilization” mode. For most everyday videos, learning to hold the phone with two hands, keeping your elbows tucked in, and leaning against a solid object will eliminate 90% of the shakiness. A gimbal is a bulky, complicated tool that is often overkill, adding setup time that might make you miss the moment altogether.
The reason your sunset photos look washed out is because you’re not lowering the exposure manually.
Protecting the Fire in the Sky
Imagine the bright, fiery sun is the flame of a candle in a dark room. Your iPhone camera, in its attempt to be helpful, tries to brighten up the entire dark room. In doing so, it exposes for the shadows, and the candle flame becomes a giant, blown-out white blob with no detail. The same thing happens with a sunset. To capture the rich, deep colors, you need to tell your camera to protect that flame. Tap on the sky, then slide the little sun icon down. This lowers the exposure, making the scene darker but preserving the incredible colors of the sunset.
If you’re still ignoring the histogram in third-party apps, you’re losing control over your photo’s exposure.
The Photo’s Secret EKG
A histogram looks like a confusing graph, but it’s actually a simple EKG for your photo’s brightness. Imagine the graph shows a mountain range. The left side represents the darkest shadows (black), the right side represents the brightest highlights (white), and the middle is all the mid-tones. If you see a huge mountain peak slammed against the right wall, it means parts of your photo are pure white, with no detail—like a blown-out sky. If it’s slammed against the left, you have pure black spots. It’s a cheat sheet that tells you if you’re losing detail before you even look closely.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that you can’t take long-exposure photos on an iPhone without a special app.
The Hidden Magic in Your Live Photos
Thinking you need a special app for long-exposure shots—those photos where car lights become streaks and waterfalls look silky smooth—is a common myth. The magic is already hiding inside your Live Photos. Take a Live Photo of something with motion, like a fountain or a moving train. Now, open the photo, swipe up, and you’ll see a few effects. Choose “Long Exposure.” Your iPhone will intelligently blend all the tiny frames of the 3-second Live Photo into one, creating a stunning long-exposure shot that looks like it was taken with a professional camera and a tripod.
I wish I knew how to copy and paste edits across multiple photos in the Photos app when I started editing.
The Magic Paintbrush That Remembers
Imagine you just took 20 photos at the beach during sunset. You open the first one and spend time perfecting the edits—adjusting the warmth, boosting the contrast, and making the colors pop. Now what? Do you have to repeat those exact same ten steps for the other 19 photos? No. Once you’ve edited the first photo, tap the three dots in the corner and select “Copy Edits.” It’s like dipping a magic paintbrush into that specific color of paint. Then, you can select all the other photos, tap the dots again, and “Paste Edits,” instantly applying that same beautiful look to all of them.
99% of users make this one mistake when framing shots: not using negative space effectively.
Giving Your Subject Room to Breathe
Imagine a portrait of a person crammed into a tiny closet. It would feel claustrophobic and uncomfortable. That’s what it’s like when you frame your subject without any negative space—the empty area around them. Negative space is like the open, airy room that surrounds the person in the portrait. It gives your subject—be it a person, a flower, or a coffee cup—room to breathe. It helps to define the subject, direct the viewer’s eye, and can create a powerful sense of mood, scale, or emotion. Don’t be afraid of the emptiness; it’s what makes the subject stand out.
This one small action of enabling Lens Correction will change the way your wide-angle shots look forever.
Straightening the Bowed Walls
Have you ever taken a photo of a building or a room with the ultra-wide lens and noticed that the straight lines near the edges of the frame look weirdly bent and distorted, as if the walls are bowing outwards? This is a natural effect of a wide-angle lens. Tucked away in your camera settings (under “Formats”) is a simple toggle called “Lens Correction.” Turning this on is like having a digital carpenter who automatically straightens those bent lines for you. It subtly corrects the distortion, making your architectural and indoor shots look much more natural and professional.
Use a dedicated app like Halide for manual controls, not just the native camera app for serious photography.
Taking the Wheel from the Self-Driving Car
The native iPhone Camera app is like a fantastic self-driving car. It makes all the complex decisions for you—focus, shutter speed, ISO—and gets you a beautiful result 95% of the time. But what if you want to take full creative control? A manual camera app like Halide is like switching to manual transmission. It lets you take the wheel. You can precisely set the shutter speed to create intentional motion blur or dial in the perfect ISO for a clean shot in the dark. It hands you the keys, transforming your phone from a point-and-shoot into a powerful, professional tool.
Stop guessing your composition. Do enable the camera grid instead for balanced photos.
The Training Wheels for Your Eyes
When you’re first learning to ride a bike, training wheels give you a sense of balance and structure. The camera grid does the exact same thing for your photographic eye. By turning it on, you’re not just guessing if your horizon is straight or if your subject is well-placed. You have a clear visual guide. You can align a shoreline perfectly with one of the horizontal lines or place a tree on one of the powerful vertical lines. It’s a simple, ever-present coach that trains your brain to see balanced, compelling compositions everywhere, even when the grid is off.
Stop taking boring food photos from above. Do shoot from a 45-degree angle instead for more depth.
A Diner’s View, Not a Bird’s-Eye View
The overhead, top-down food photo has become a cliché. It flattens the dish, turning a beautiful, three-dimensional creation into a flat, graphic circle on a plate. It’s a bird’s-eye view, but nobody eats like a bird. Instead, get down to a 45-degree angle. This is how you actually see the food when you’re sitting at the table, about to take a bite. This angle reveals the texture of the burger, the layers of the cake, and the height of the pasta. It creates depth and makes the food look far more delicious and inviting.
The #1 hack for getting rid of reflections in your photos is using a polarizing filter.
The Magic Sunglasses for Your iPhone
Imagine you’re trying to take a photo of a fish in a pond, but all you can see is the glaring reflection of the sky on the water’s surface. A polarizing filter is like a pair of polarized sunglasses for your iPhone lens. When you snap it on and rotate it, it’s like magic. The glare vanishes, and suddenly you can see straight through the water to the fish below. It works the same way for reflections on windows, the shine on a car’s paint, or for making a blue sky look deeper and more dramatic.
I’m just going to say it: The Cinematic mode on new iPhones is mostly a gimmick.
A Robot Director That Tries Too Hard
Cinematic mode promises that Hollywood-style, blurry-background look that automatically shifts focus between people. It’s like having a tiny robot director inside your phone. The problem is, this robot director is often clumsy. It gets confused, blurring the wrong things, creating an awkward halo around your subject’s head, and shifting focus at unnatural moments. While it can be fun to play with, you can often achieve a more beautiful and authentic-looking shot by simply using the telephoto lens and physically moving to create natural depth, rather than relying on a software trick that isn’t quite ready for primetime.
The reason your videos have terrible audio is because the built-in microphone is picking up wind noise.
The Roar That Drowns the Conversation
Imagine trying to have a heartfelt conversation with a friend while standing next to a jet engine. You might be saying the most important words, but all anyone will hear is an overwhelming roar. That’s what even a slight breeze sounds like to your iPhone’s tiny, sensitive built-in microphone. It creates a rumbling, distorted noise that makes speech impossible to understand. Shielding the phone from the wind with your body or, even better, using an external microphone with a furry “deadcat” windscreen is the only way to quiet the roar and actually hear the conversation.
If you’re still not using the timer for group photos, you’re losing the ability to be in the shot yourself.
Breaking Free from Behind the Camera
You’re always the one taking the photos of your friends and family. You capture all the great memories, but when you look back, there’s a missing person: you. You exist only as the photographer, never as part of the group. Using the camera’s timer is your ticket into the memory. Just prop your phone against a water bottle, set the 3 or 10-second timer, and hit the shutter. It gives you just enough time to run back and join the group, ensuring that the photo captures everyone who was there, including the person who made the memory possible.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that iPhone photography isn’t “real” photography.
It’s the Chef, Not the Oven
Saying iPhone photography isn’t “real” photography is like saying a meal isn’t “real” food because it was cooked in a modern oven instead of over an open fire. It’s nonsense. A camera is just a tool for capturing light and emotion. The “real” part of photography is the person using that tool. It’s about having a creative vision, understanding light, composing a compelling scene, and capturing a decisive moment. A master photographer can create a breathtaking work of art with an iPhone, while a novice can take a boring photo with a $10,000 camera. The tool doesn’t define the art.
I wish I knew that tapping on a face in a photo would help me find more pictures of that person.
The Secret Rolodex in Your Photos
Your Photos app is secretly a brilliant detective. When you’re looking at a photo of a friend, you can simply tap on their face in the image. This often brings up a small circle with their face in it. Tap that, and the Photos app will instantly show you a collection of every other picture you have of that person. It’s like having a magic Rolodex that automatically organizes your entire photo library by the people in them. It’s the quickest way to find that one great shot of your mom from last year’s vacation.
99% of people make this mistake when editing portraits: over-smoothing the skin.
The Uncanny Valley of Portraits
We all want to look our best in photos, so it’s tempting to use editing sliders to smooth out every line and blemish on our skin. But when you push it too far, something strange happens. The person in the photo stops looking human. They look like a plastic doll or a wax figure, with no texture, no pores, and no character. This is the “uncanny valley” of photo editing. A little bit of softening can be nice, but preserving natural skin texture is what keeps a portrait looking authentic and alive. Don’t erase the person; just enhance them.
This one small habit of creating shared albums will change the way you share memories with family forever.
The Private Family Photo Wall
After a family vacation or a birthday party, what happens? Everyone texts a few of their best photos, the quality gets compressed, and the pictures end up scattered across a dozen different conversations, lost forever. A Shared Album is like creating a private, digital photo wall just for your family. Everyone you invite can add their own photos and videos in full quality, see each other’s contributions, and even leave comments. It’s one central, collaborative place to collect and relive your shared memories, keeping them organized and accessible for years to come.
Use QuickTake to record video from Photo mode, not switching modes and missing the moment.
The “Oh, Shoot!” Moment Saver
You’re in Photo mode, about to take a picture of your cat doing something cute, when suddenly it does something hilarious that you need to capture on video. You frantically swipe over to Video mode, but by the time the camera switches, the moment is over. You missed it. QuickTake is the solution. From the standard Photo mode, just press and hold the shutter button. It will instantly start recording a video. You can even slide it to the right to lock it in place. It’s an instantaneous video button that ensures you capture the unexpected action without the fumbling.
Stop trying to hold your phone perfectly still for videos. Do lean against a solid object instead.
Be the Tripod
Your body is not a rock. No matter how hard you try to hold your phone still, your natural breathing and tiny muscle movements will create a subtle, distracting shake in your videos. You can fight it, or you can use your environment. Instead of standing in the middle of a room, lean your body against a wall, a tree, or a doorway. Brace your elbows against your chest. This simple act of using a solid, immovable object to steady your body effectively turns you into a human tripod, resulting in dramatically smoother and more professional-looking footage.
Stop storing all your photos on your device. Do use iCloud Photo Library instead to save space.
The Magic, Bottomless Photo Album
Keeping thousands of photos and videos directly on your iPhone is like trying to stuff a lifetime of photo albums into a single shoebox. Sooner or later, you’re going to run out of space, and your phone will become frustratingly slow. Turning on iCloud Photo Library is like getting a magic, bottomless photo album that lives securely in the cloud. It keeps the full-resolution originals safe while leaving a smaller, space-saving version on your phone. You can still browse and share everything instantly, but your phone stays fast and has plenty of room for new memories.
The #1 secret for better macro shots is the new dedicated Macro mode, not just cropping a regular photo.
A Magnifying Glass, Not a Photocopier
Trying to get a macro shot by taking a regular photo and then cropping way in is like photocopying a single word from a book page and then enlarging it 100 times. All you get is a blurry, pixelated mess that lacks detail. The dedicated Macro mode on newer iPhones is completely different. It’s like having a powerful magnifying glass built right into your camera lens. As you move the phone very close to a subject, like a flower or an insect, the lens automatically switches and refocuses, capturing an incredible amount of tiny, intricate detail that was simply invisible before.
I’m just going to say it: iPhone night mode is better than on many dedicated cameras.
A Superhuman Eye for Darkness
Most traditional cameras, when faced with a very dark scene, struggle. They produce grainy, murky images that don’t capture the feeling of being there. The iPhone’s Night mode is like a superpower. When you hold the shutter, it’s not just taking one photo. It’s taking a rapid series of pictures at different exposures over a few seconds and then using its powerful computer brain to analyze them. It intelligently fuses the sharpest parts and brightest details together, creating one stunningly clear, bright, and atmospheric photo that, in many cases, looks even better than what you could see with your own eyes.
The reason your colors look off is because you haven’t adjusted the white balance.
Teaching Your Camera the Color White
Imagine you’re wearing a white shirt. Indoors, under a yellowish lightbulb, it looks a bit yellow. Outside, in the blueish shade, it looks a bit blue. Your brain automatically knows it’s a white shirt and adjusts. Your camera, however, can get confused. White balance is you telling the camera, “Hey, this thing is supposed to be truly white.” Once it understands what white is, it can accurately reproduce all the other colors in the scene. If your photos look too yellow or too blue, a quick white balance adjustment in editing will make the colors look natural and true to life.
If you’re still sending photos via text message, you’re losing image quality due to compression.
The Incredible Shrinking Photograph
Sending a beautiful, high-resolution photo through a standard text message (SMS/MMS) is like forcing a masterpiece painting through a fax machine. To send it quickly over the cellular network, your phone service provider aggressively squishes and compresses the file, throwing away huge amounts of data. What arrives on the other end is a smaller, blurrier, and less vibrant version of your original photo. To preserve the quality, use a method that sends the full file, like AirDrop, iMessage (blue bubbles), or a file-sharing link from iCloud or Google Photos.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that you need a new iPhone every year for better pictures.
The Artist Buys a New Brush
Imagine a talented painter. They create beautiful art with their favorite set of brushes. Will buying the newest, most expensive brush on the market suddenly make them a better painter overnight? Of course not. Their skill comes from their understanding of color, light, and composition. While a new iPhone might offer a new feature or a slight improvement, the fundamentals of photography remain the same. A photographer with a three-year-old iPhone who has mastered composition and light will always take better pictures than a novice with the latest model. The artist is more important than the brush.
I wish I knew how to use the “Look Up” feature to identify plants and animals in my photos sooner.
Your Photo Is a Visual Encyclopedia
You’re on a hike and take a photo of a beautiful, strange-looking flower. Later, you wonder what it was. Instead of trying to describe it to a search engine (“spiky purple flower with yellow spots”), just open the photo on your iPhone. If you see a little “i” icon with sparkles on it, tap it. Then tap “Look Up.” Your phone will analyze the image and tell you the species of the plant, animal, or even the landmark you photographed. It’s like having a built-in nature expert and encyclopedia that can identify the world from your pictures.
99% of users make this mistake when taking selfies: using a distracting background.
You’re the Star, Not the Scenery
You take a selfie, thinking you look great, but when you look at the photo, your eyes are drawn to the overflowing trash can behind you, the messy room, or the person making a funny face in the background. A distracting background is like having a loud, obnoxious extra in the most important scene of your movie. It steals the show. Before you snap that selfie, take one second to look at what’s behind you. Find a simple, clean background—like a plain wall or a clear sky—that makes you the undeniable star of the photograph.
This one small action of editing the key photo of a Live Photo will change your best pictures.
Finding the Gem Within the Geode
Taking a Live Photo is like finding a geode. The initial picture you see—the “key photo”—is just the plain, rocky outside. It might be good, but the real magic is often hidden inside. When you edit a Live Photo, you can scrub through the entire 3-second video clip frame by frame. You’ll almost always find a hidden gem: a moment where your friend’s smile was more genuine, the wave was crashing perfectly, or your eyes were wide open. By selecting that better frame and tapping “Make Key Photo,” you crack open the geode and reveal the true masterpiece inside.
Use the straighten tool in the crop menu, not just tilting your phone to get a level horizon.
The Carpenter’s Level for Your Photos
No matter how carefully you think you’re holding your phone, it’s almost impossible to get a perfectly level horizon, especially when you’re shooting quickly. A slightly crooked photo of an ocean or a building just feels… off. It’s unsettling to the eye. Trying to fix it by physically tilting your phone is just guesswork. Instead, go into the editing menu and tap the crop tool. The straighten tool gives you a precise grid and a dial, like a carpenter’s level. With a simple slide of your finger, you can make micro-adjustments and ensure your horizons are perfectly, satisfyingly straight.
Stop trying to capture everything in one shot. Do focus on a single, compelling subject instead.
A Single Voice Is Clearer Than a Crowd
A photo that tries to capture everything—the mountains, the lake, the trees, the people, the boat, and the dog—often ends up capturing nothing of importance. It’s like listening to a room where everyone is talking at once; it’s just noise. A powerful photograph is like a single, clear voice. It isolates one compelling subject and makes it the hero of the story. Instead of a wide, chaotic shot of the whole beach, take a photo of the interesting pattern the water makes in the sand, or the way the light hits a single seashell.
Stop using third-party apps to remove objects. Do use the new built-in subject lift feature instead.
The Magic Lasso Tool for Your Fingers
You have a great photo of your dog, but you want to put him on a different background to make a funny sticker. In the past, this meant using a complicated app to painstakingly trace around his fur. Now, it’s like you have a magic lasso. Just open the photo in your Photos app and long-press on your dog. You’ll see a shimmering outline appear around him as your iPhone intelligently isolates him from the background. From there, you can literally lift and drag him out of the photo and drop him into a message, note, or another app.
The #1 hack for taking discreet photos is using the volume button on your headphones as a shutter.
The Secret Agent’s Shutter Button
There are times you want to take a candid photo without being obvious by holding up your phone and tapping the screen. It can make people feel awkward and ruin the moment. Here’s a trick straight out of a spy movie: if you have wired headphones connected to your iPhone, the volume up or down button on the cord acts as a remote shutter. You can let your phone rest on a table or hang casually by your side, point it in the right direction, and discreetly click the button on your headphone cord to snap a photo.
I’m just going to say it: The flash on the front-facing camera makes selfies look worse.
The Interrogation Room Selfie
The front-facing “Retina Flash” works by making your entire screen flash a bright, intense light directly into your face. The effect is less “beautiful glow” and more “interrogation room spotlight.” It flattens your features, creates harsh, unflattering shadows, and often causes red-eye. It highlights every imperfection and creates a stark, unnatural look. In almost every low-light situation, you will get a more flattering and atmospheric selfie by finding a source of ambient light—like a window or a lamp—and facing it, rather than blasting your face with a tiny, harsh screen-flash.
The reason your action shots are blurry is because you’re not using Burst Mode.
One Shot vs. a High-Speed Camera
Trying to capture a fast-moving subject, like a person running or a bird in flight, with a single tap of the shutter is a game of pure luck. Your camera needs a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, and your timing has to be perfect. The result is almost always a blurry mess. Burst Mode, which you activate by holding the shutter, turns your iPhone into a high-speed camera. It fires off a stream of photos in a fraction of a second. Within that burst, there will almost certainly be one or two frames that are perfectly sharp and capture the peak of the action.
If you’re still not using Memories in the Photos app, you’re losing beautifully curated video slideshows.
Your Own Personal Movie Director
Your iPhone’s camera roll contains thousands of photos and videos—a treasure trove of memories that mostly just sits there, unseen. The “Memories” feature in the Photos app is like having a personal movie director who sifts through this treasure for you. It automatically finds related photos from a trip, a specific time period, or featuring certain people, and then edits them together into a beautiful, moving video slideshow, complete with music and transitions. It’s a wonderful surprise to discover these little movies that your phone creates for you, helping you relive moments you may have forgotten.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that you need to be a professional to take great iPhone photos.
You Don’t Need a License to Tell a Story
Believing you need professional training to take a great photo is like thinking you need a literature degree to tell a heartfelt story to a friend. The technical rules of photography are helpful, but they are just the grammar. The real power of a photo comes from its heart—the emotion, the story, the unique way you see the world. Your iPhone is an incredibly powerful storytelling tool that’s simple enough for anyone to use. Focus on capturing what you feel, and you will create photos that are more impactful and “real” than any technically perfect but soulless image.
I wish I knew about the “Duplicate” photo option to create different edited versions of the same shot.
The Fork in the Creative Road
You have a photo you love, but you can’t decide how to edit it. Should you make it a dramatic black and white? Or should you go for a vibrant, colorful look? You don’t have to choose. In the edit menu, you can select “Duplicate.” This creates an exact copy of your image. Now you have a fork in the road. You can edit the original into a stunning black and white masterpiece and then edit the copy into a completely different, colorful version. It gives you the freedom to experiment and explore different creative paths without ever losing your original starting point.
99% of people make this one mistake when recording interviews: not using a second iPhone for better audio recording.
Don’t Let Your Audio Be an Afterthought
When you film an interview, you place your iPhone at a distance to get a good visual frame. But the further the camera is, the worse the audio sounds. The built-in mic picks up room echo and background noise. The solution is simple: use a second phone. Start a video recording on your main phone for the visuals. Then, take a second phone, start a Voice Memo recording, and place it right in front of the person speaking, just out of the frame. Later, you can easily sync the high-quality audio from the voice memo with your video, making your interview sound incredibly clear and professional.
This one small habit of regularly backing up your photos will save you from heartbreak.
The Insurance Policy for Your Memories
Your iPhone holds your memories: your vacations, your family, the first steps of your child. Now imagine your phone is lost, stolen, or broken. Without a backup, all of those irreplaceable moments are gone forever. It’s a truly heartbreaking feeling. Backing up your photos, either with iCloud or by plugging into a computer, is the insurance policy for your life’s story. It takes a little bit of effort to set up, but that one small habit ensures that no matter what happens to the physical device, your precious memories are always safe and sound.
Use the perspective correction tool, not just accepting distorted lines in your architectural photos.
The Architect’s Secret Weapon
When you stand at the base of a tall building and point your camera up, the vertical lines of the building appear to fall away from you, converging at the top. It’s a natural perspective distortion, but it can look sloppy. The perspective correction tools, found in the crop menu, are like an architect’s secret weapon. They allow you to grab the corners of your photo and pull them, digitally straightening out those converging lines. You can make a building look perfectly vertical, as if you shot it from straight on, creating a powerful and professional architectural shot.
Stop just taking wide shots of landscapes. Do look for interesting foreground elements instead.
The Path That Leads Your Eye
A wide shot of a beautiful mountain range can be nice, but it often feels distant and flat. It’s a postcard, not an experience. To make your landscape photos more immersive, you need to find a foreground element. This is something interesting in the front of your scene—like a cluster of flowers, a winding path, or a uniquely shaped rock. By getting low and placing this element in the bottom of your frame, you create a sense of depth. It’s like a visual welcome mat that invites the viewer’s eye into the scene and leads them on a journey towards the mountains in the background.
Stop sending low-quality videos. Do use AirDrop for full-quality sharing instead.
Sending the Blu-ray, Not the Bootleg
Sending a video to another iPhone user via text message often results in a pixelated, blurry mess because it gets heavily compressed. It’s like sending a low-quality, bootleg copy of a movie. AirDrop, on the other hand, is like handing your friend the original Blu-ray disc. It uses a direct Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection between two nearby Apple devices to transfer the original, full-resolution video file with absolutely no loss in quality. The video they receive is exactly as crisp and clear as the one you shot, preserving every detail.
The #1 secret for finding your best photos is using the search function in the Photos app.
Your Personal Photo Librarian
Your photo library has thousands of images. How do you find that one photo of a dog you saw at the beach three summers ago? Scrolling would take forever. The search bar in the Photos app is your personal librarian. It’s incredibly powerful. You can type in almost anything: “beach,” “dog,” “summer 2022,” “sunsets,” or even a friend’s name. The app uses artificial intelligence to analyze your photos and will instantly pull up all the relevant images. It’s the fastest and most magical way to rediscover the memories buried in your camera roll.
I’m just going to say it: A cheap tripod will improve your iPhone photos more than a new lens.
The Foundation Is More Important Than the Window
Buying an expensive new lens for your iPhone is like installing a fancy new window in a house with shaky foundations. The view might be slightly different, but the whole structure is unstable. A tripod, even a small, cheap one, is the solid foundation. It eliminates camera shake completely. This allows you to use powerful techniques that are impossible handheld, like silky smooth long exposures of water, crystal-clear Night mode shots, and perfectly steady time-lapses. A stable camera is the secret to sharpness and creativity, and it will elevate your photography more than any piece of glass you can attach.
The reason your food photos look unappetizing is because of poor lighting.
Food Needs to Be Seen to Be Tasted
Imagine a world-class chef preparing a stunning dish in a completely dark kitchen. No one could appreciate the vibrant colors and beautiful presentation. Lighting is the single most important ingredient in food photography. Harsh overhead lights create ugly glare, and using your flash makes food look greasy and flat. The secret is soft, natural light. The next time you’re at a restaurant, ask for a table near a window. The diffused daylight will make your food look fresh, textured, and incredibly delicious, just as the chef intended. Good light makes you want to take a bite.
If you’re still using the default video recording settings, you’re losing the option for higher frame rates.
Choosing Between Standard and Silky Smooth
The default video setting is like watching a standard movie. It looks perfectly fine. However, in your camera settings, you have the option to record at a higher frame rate, like 60 frames per second (fps). Think of frames as individual pictures that make up the video. Shooting at 60 fps is like capturing twice as many pictures every second. This doesn’t just make fast-moving action look incredibly clear and smooth; it also gives you the magical ability to slow down your footage later while keeping it looking silky and fluid, rather than choppy.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that you can “fix it in post.”
You Can’t Un-burn the Toast
“Fix it in post” is the photographer’s procrastination anthem. It’s the belief that you can correct any mistake later with editing software. While editing is powerful, it has limits. If your main subject is out of focus, you can’t magically make it sharp. If the sky is completely white and blown out, you can’t recover that lost detail. It’s like burning a piece of toast. You can scrape off some of the black bits, but you can never turn it back into perfectly golden-brown bread. Getting the shot right in the camera—focus, exposure, and composition—is always the best recipe for success.
I wish I knew how to trim the beginning and end of my videos directly in the Photos app earlier.
The Film Editor in Your Pocket
You just recorded a great 30-second video clip, but the first three seconds are just you fumbling to press the record button, and the last two seconds are you reaching to stop it. You don’t need a fancy video editing app to fix this. In the Photos app, just tap “Edit” on your video. You’ll see a timeline at the bottom with yellow handles at each end. Simply drag those handles inward to trim off the unwanted parts at the beginning and end. It’s a quick, simple way to clean up your clips, making them instantly more shareable and watchable.
99% of users make this one mistake when using Portrait Lighting: choosing unnatural-looking effects.
A Portrait, Not a Theater Production
Portrait Lighting effects can be powerful, but they are also very easy to overdo. The “Stage Light” and “Stage Light Mono” effects, which plunge your background into pure black, are the biggest culprits. They often look artificial, with clumsy cutouts around the subject, like a high schooler’s first attempt at Photoshop. It screams “fake.” For a timeless and beautiful portrait, it’s almost always better to stick with the “Natural Light” or “Studio Light” options. They subtly enhance your subject without looking like you’re trying to put on a dramatic, low-budget theater production.
This one small action of turning on “View Full HDR” will change how you see your photos on your device.
Taking the Sunglasses Off Your Screen
You take a photo of a bright sunset, and it looks amazing on your iPhone’s screen—the brights are brilliant, and the shadows are deep. But then you look at it on an older screen, and it looks flat and washed out. That’s because your iPhone has a special HDR (High Dynamic Range) display. Tucked in your Photos settings is an option called “View Full HDR.” Turning this on ensures that when you view your photos, your screen is using its full power to show you the brightest highlights and deepest shadows that it’s capable of, letting you see the true, stunning quality of your images.
Use a Bluetooth remote for group shots, not the 10-second timer.
The Director’s Clicker, Not a Ticking Clock
Using the 10-second timer for a group photo is a frantic race against time. You press the button and then sprint back to the group, trying to get into position and force a natural smile before the camera flashes. It’s stressful. A small, inexpensive Bluetooth remote shutter changes everything. You can set up your phone, get everyone composed and relaxed, and wait for the perfect, genuine moment. When everyone is laughing naturally, you just press the discreet button in your hand. It turns you from a flustered participant into a calm director.
Stop taking photos in direct midday sun. Do shoot during the “golden hour” instead.
The Harsh Spotlight vs. the Warm Glow
Taking a portrait in the direct, overhead sun at noon is like placing your subject under a harsh interrogation spotlight. It creates deep, dark shadows under their eyes and nose (“raccoon eyes”) and makes them squint. It’s the least flattering light imaginable. The “golden hour,” which is the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, is completely different. The sun is low in the sky, creating a soft, warm, golden light that wraps around your subject beautifully. The shadows are long and gentle, and everyone looks their best. It’s nature’s perfect photo studio.
Stop trying to manually organize your photos. Do let the Photos app categorize them by location and date instead.
The Self-Organizing Library
Many of us have a messy digital shoebox of thousands of photos. The idea of manually creating folders and organizing them is completely overwhelming. The good news is, you don’t have to. Your Photos app is already a genius librarian. It automatically organizes everything for you. You can browse your photos by the year, month, or day they were taken. Better yet, you can go to the “Places” tab and see your photos neatly pinned on a world map. Your phone does all the hard work of filing your memories so you can spend your time enjoying them.
The #1 hack for creating time-lapses is using a tripod to keep your phone steady.
A Solid Foundation for Sped-Up Time
A time-lapse video compresses a long period—like a 30-minute sunset—into a few seconds. The magic comes from seeing the world change from a single, fixed viewpoint. If you try to hold your phone by hand for that long, it will inevitably shake and shift. The final video will be a jittery, unwatchable mess that makes the viewer feel seasick. A tripod locks your phone into that one single perspective. It’s the absolutely essential ingredient that provides the steady foundation, allowing the clouds to glide smoothly and the sun to set beautifully in a stable, professional-looking shot.
I’m just going to say it: The “Vivid” filter is the worst thing you can do to your photos.
The Cartoon Version of Your Memory
Applying the “Vivid” filter (or its cousin, “Vivid Warm”) is like taking a beautiful, natural painting and tracing over it with a pack of fluorescent highlighter pens. It cranks up the color saturation to such an artificial level that it destroys all subtlety. Blue skies become an unnatural cobalt, greens look radioactive, and skin tones turn a blotchy, orange mess. It makes your photo look cheap and over-processed, like a cartoon version of reality. A great photo relies on good light and composition, not on a filter that makes your memories look like a sugar rush.
The reason your pet photos are always blurry is because you’re not using Burst Mode.
Predicting the Unpredictable
Pets are chaos agents. They are fast, unpredictable, and they never sit still when you want them to. Trying to capture that perfect, adorable moment with a single tap of the camera button is an exercise in frustration. You’ll almost always be a split-second too late, resulting in a blurry photo of your pet’s tail leaving the frame. Burst Mode is your secret weapon. The moment your pet starts doing something cute, just hold down the shutter button. It will fire off a ton of photos, and somewhere in that sequence, you will have frozen the perfect, sharp, and priceless expression.
If you’re still not using Shared Photo Libraries with your partner, you’re losing a seamless way to share memories.
Our Photos, Not Just My Photos and Your Photos
You and your partner both take pictures of your vacation or your kids, but your photos live on your phone and their photos live on theirs. It’s a pain to constantly have to ask, “Can you send me that picture you took?” A Shared Photo Library is like merging your two camera rolls into one. You can set it to automatically share photos you take when you’re together. It means all the memories you create as a couple live in one central, shared place that you both have access to, all the time. No more missing out on half the story.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that more lenses on the back of the phone automatically means better pictures.
More Tools Don’t Make a Better Carpenter
A carpenter’s toolbox might have three different hammers, but that doesn’t automatically make them a master builder. It’s how they use the hammer that matters. Similarly, having multiple lenses on a phone (wide, ultra-wide, telephoto) is great for versatility, but it doesn’t guarantee a good photo. The quality of the main camera sensor and the software processing the image are far more important. A phone with one fantastic main camera can often take better pictures than a phone with three mediocre ones. It’s the quality of the primary tool, not the quantity of options, that counts.
I wish I knew how to create a “Favorites” album to quickly find my best shots.
Your Personal Greatest Hits Collection
Your camera roll is a mix of everything: masterpieces, blurry mistakes, screenshots, and 15 photos of your lunch. Finding your absolute best pictures can be a chore. The “Favorites” feature is your one-tap solution. When you’re looking at a photo you truly love, just tap the little heart icon. This doesn’t move the photo; it simply tags it and adds a copy to a special “Favorites” album. Over time, this album becomes your personal “greatest hits” collection, a curated gallery of your proudest moments that you can instantly access and share.
99% of people make this one mistake when taking pictures of kids: not getting down on their level.
See the World Through Their Eyes
When adults take pictures of children, we usually do it from our own towering height. We point the camera down at them. This makes the child look small and powerless, and we see a lot of the floor. The world doesn’t look like that to them. The single most impactful thing you can do is get down on their level. Kneel or even lie on the ground so your camera is at their eye level. Suddenly, you are in their world. The photo becomes more intimate, engaging, and captures their personality from their own perspective.
This one small habit of cleaning your lens will have the biggest impact on your photo quality.
Don’t Shoot Through a Hazy Fog
Your iPhone lens is constantly being touched, pocketed, and exposed to the world. It accumulates a thin layer of fingerprint oil, dust, and pocket lint. You may not even see it, but it’s there. This grime acts like a hazy fog, scattering light and making your photos look soft, washed out, and plagued with weird lens flares. Taking two seconds to wipe the lens with a soft cloth (like a t-shirt or microfiber) before you shoot is the most important habit you can develop. It’s a free, instant upgrade that makes every single photo you take sharper and clearer.
Use leading lines in your composition, not just placing your subject in the center of the frame.
The Visual Road Map for Your Eyes
A leading line is any element in your photo that acts like a road or a path, guiding the viewer’s eye through the scene to your main subject. It could be a road, a fence, a shoreline, or even the arm of a person pointing. Instead of just putting your subject in the middle of a photo, find a leading line and use it to create a journey. Start the line at the corner of your frame and have it lead towards your subject. This technique makes your photos more dynamic, creates a sense of depth, and turns a simple snapshot into a compelling, well-thought-out composition.
Stop using Snapchat for important photos. Do use the native Camera app instead for higher quality.
The Disposable Camera vs. the Professional Camera
Taking an important photo with an app like Snapchat is like choosing to capture a once-in-a-lifetime moment with a cheap, disposable camera. These apps are designed for quick, temporary messages, so they heavily compress your photos to save data. The image quality is significantly lower. Your iPhone’s native Camera app, however, is a high-quality, powerful tool. It captures the maximum amount of detail, color, and information possible. For any photo you want to keep, edit, or print, always use the real Camera app to ensure you have the best possible original file.
Stop taking photos with the sun behind your subject. Do have the sun light your subject’s face instead.
Don’t Turn Your Subject into a Silhouette
When you take a picture of a person with the bright sun directly behind them, your camera gets confused. To avoid blowing out the incredibly bright sky, it makes everything else dark. Your subject turns into a featureless black silhouette. You can’t see their face or their expression. The solution is simple: change positions. Put the sun behind you, the photographer. Now, that beautiful, bright light is falling directly onto your subject’s face, illuminating them perfectly. This one change will instantly make your portraits brighter, clearer, and full of life.
The #1 secret for dramatic black and white photos is shooting in high-contrast light.
Finding the Light and the Shadows
A great black and white photograph isn’t about color; it’s about the powerful interplay between light and shadow. A photo taken on an overcast, cloudy day will often look flat and boring in black and white because there are no strong shadows. The secret is to look for high-contrast light—like the harsh midday sun creating deep shadows, or a single beam of light coming through a window. These scenes, which often look terrible in color, are perfect for black and white. The lack of color emphasizes the bold shapes, textures, and the dramatic dance between brightness and darkness.
I’m just going to say it: You probably don’t need a third-party video editing app.
The Powerful Editing Suite You Already Own
Many people believe they need to download a complicated and expensive app to edit their videos. The truth is, the editing tools built right into the iPhone’s Photos app are incredibly powerful and more than enough for 99% of users. You can trim clips, adjust exposure and color, apply filters, crop and straighten, and even mute the audio, all without leaving the app. Before you go searching for a professional editing suite, spend some time exploring the robust, free, and easy-to-use tools that are already in your pocket. They are surprisingly capable.
The reason your videos are shaky is because you’re walking while filming instead of standing still.
The Human Earthquake Effect
When you walk, your body naturally moves up and down. Even with the iPhone’s amazing stabilization, filming while you’re walking introduces a persistent, distracting bobbing motion into your footage. It’s like a mini-earthquake in every shot, and it can make your viewers feel queasy. The professional approach is to move, then stop, then film. Walk to your first position, plant your feet firmly, and record your stable shot. Then stop recording, walk to your next position, plant your feet again, and get your next shot. Your final video will be a sequence of steady, watchable clips.
If you’re still not using the “Hide” feature for photos, you’re losing your privacy.
The Secret Drawer in Your Photo Album
You hand your phone to a friend to show them a funny picture, and then you watch in horror as they start swiping left and right through your entire camera roll. We all have photos that are private—a silly selfie, a screenshot of a personal message, or a gift idea for the person looking at your phone. The “Hide” feature is your secret digital drawer. Selecting a photo and hiding it removes it from your main library and places it in a separate “Hidden” album that requires your Face ID or passcode to open. It’s a simple way to maintain your privacy.
The biggest lie you’ve been told is that the front camera’s quality is close to the rear camera’s.
The Porthole vs. the Picture Window
Your iPhone’s rear camera system is the picture window. It has the largest sensor, the most advanced lens, and the full power of the image processing chip behind it. The front-facing selfie camera is the porthole. It’s much smaller, has a less powerful sensor, and is designed for convenience over quality. While selfie cameras have gotten much better, there is still a significant, noticeable gap in sharpness, color accuracy, and low-light performance. For any photo or video where quality is the top priority, the rear camera is, and will be for the foreseeable future, the undisputed champion.
I wish I knew that I could record video and take still photos at the same time.
The Two-for-One Memory Catcher
You’re recording a video of a magical moment, like your child blowing out their birthday candles. You want to capture the motion and the sound, but you also desperately want a perfect, high-quality photograph of that exact moment. You don’t have to choose. While you are recording a video on your iPhone, you will see a white shutter button appear on the screen next to the red record button. Tapping that white button will snap a full-resolution still photo without interrupting your video recording. It’s a brilliant feature that lets you capture both the moving memory and the perfect frozen moment.
99% of users make this one mistake when taking mirror selfies: not cleaning the mirror first.
The Smudged Window to Your Soul
You’ve found the perfect lighting and you’ve struck the perfect pose for a mirror selfie. You snap the picture, but when you look at it, all you can see are the distracting smudges, fingerprints, and toothpaste specks all over the mirror. A dirty mirror is like a dirty camera lens—it ruins the shot. It doesn’t matter how good you look if the surface you’re using to take the photo is filthy. Taking five seconds to wipe down the mirror with a cloth before you start shooting will result in a dramatically cleaner, clearer, and more professional-looking selfie.
This one small action of locking focus on your subject’s eyes will change your portraits forever.
The Windows to the Soul Must Be in Focus
In a portrait, the most important element is the connection with the subject, and that connection happens through the eyes. If the person’s nose or ear is perfectly sharp but their eyes are slightly soft, the entire portrait feels “off” and disconnected. Before you take a portrait, don’t just tap on the person’s face; zoom in slightly and tap directly on their eye. Then, use the AE/AF Lock (long press) to ensure the focus stays perfectly on that eye. This single action ensures that the most critical part of the portrait is tack-sharp, creating a powerful and engaging image.
Use HDR for high-contrast scenes, not for every single photo you take.
The Swiss Army Knife, Not the Butter Knife
HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a powerful tool designed for a specific job: scenes with both very bright highlights and very dark shadows, like a person standing in the shade with a bright sky behind them. In these situations, HDR takes multiple exposures and blends them to preserve detail in both the shadows and the highlights. It’s a Swiss Army Knife for tricky lighting. However, using it for every photo, especially when the light is even, can sometimes produce slightly unnatural-looking results. Use it when you need it, but for a simple, well-lit scene, a standard photo is often more beautiful.