Simple Tips For Taking Tack Sharp iPhone Night Photos

perhaps the hardest thing you can do is your iPhone camera is taking beautiful sharp photos it's nice and yet it still can be done and in this video I'm going to give you tips and techniques for doing exactly that so by the end of this video you'll know not only how to take beautiful sharp iPhone photos in urban areas but you'll also know how to take beautiful iPhone photos of your friends and family in settings where there's practically no light and you'll still be able to capture the photos so that you can memorize these moments that are important to you now the reason i phone knife starter fee is so hard is primarily because the sensor side of the iPhone is small and it's much smaller than the sensor of larger DSLR cameras and because of that the less light gets to reach a sensor and as a consequence the iPhone performs worse at night the larger these four cameras is that said you can still do good photography with the iPhone at night and in this video I'm going to show you how it's done now the first thing I want you to realize about night photography is that there's no such thing as photography and complete darkness so if you don't see anything if there's no life you cannot take a photo and that's because your iPhone is essentially a light capturing device so what a camera does is it essentially captures slide and if there's no life well then nothing can be captured and you can take a photo so even they're talking about ix photography we're not talking about photography in complete darkness instead we're talking about how you can make the best use possible of the light that's available around you or how you can add some light to the scene yourself using either the built-in flash of the iPhone or perhaps an external flash human so for the first part of this tutorial we're going to walk around the city and we're going to seek out illuminated subject and sources of light in the city environment that we can use for night photography and in the process I'll show you exactly what you need to do in order to make sure that your night photos are beautiful and sharp and just to clarify remove talking about night photography everything we're going to talk about also applies to low-light photography so the techniques and the principles are the same even if it's not complete darkness when you're taking a photo and simply if it's a slightly darker than average scene you can also use the techniques that you're going to discover in this video [Music] as we walk around any urban area what you will discover is that there's a lot of eliminated subject a lot of beautiful buildings are lit up you'll find billboards advertisements three times and so on and all of these can be used as a subject for night photography but there has to be some kind of light for you to be able to work just be seen and if you look at this particular view you'll see that here we have the beautiful Opera House and it has been nicely illuminated and it happens to be white which works out great for the kind of photography we want to do so right now I'm just going to turn to my iPhone and I'll explain a couple of key ideas or key techniques you need to use for taking successful 9 photos so first of all when you look at the scene like this your instinct might tell you that you have to turn on the flash but that's just not the case in fact we're going to go ahead and turn the flash off and the reason we're doing this is that the built in flash of the iPhone is really weak and it can only eliminate your subjects if they're really close to you like a few feet away but for an Oprah house far away the flash will just make no difference so we're turning that off now the other thing that's kind of counterintuitive about knife photography is that in order to take a better higher-quality photo what you really want to do is dial down the exposure a little bit so first scene like this I want to make sure the exposure is set for the highlights which happens to be subject for the Oprah house and in order to do that I'm going to tap and hold my finger which will set a long exposure on the building which is what I want now your natural reaction might be to try to you know brighten up the photo so that you can see more but what happens if you do that is that you'll see that the picture becomes really really grainy and sky which should look black in night photos in the skies and be black as it is right now it becomes orange or gray and that tone is not natural and it doesn't look pleasing to the eye so you don't want to bring the exposure up and when you do this what else happens is that highlights become blown out meaning that they're completely wide and there's no information saved in the highlights so what you want to do instead is actually reduce exposure just a little bit you don't make the photo too dark because obviously you can make you know you can overdo this adjustment but we want you want to dial down exposure just a tiny bit so the highlights are nicely beautifully exposed and you want to make sure that the black tones in the photo are in the black so the black sky and surrounding areas should also clear black in the resulting image and once we have that we can go ahead and take a photo and what you'll notice here is that my iPhone is in the tripod and I'm doing that for a reason and in low-light photography and especially night photography it's really really important that you keep your eyes on that steady as possible the best way to do that course is using a tripod but if you don't have your tripod with you you want to make sure you have a really firm grip with your iPhone or perhaps you want to support your hand against something that's not moving because the less you move your iPhone in low-light photography the better your photos are going to work out if your hands are shaking the photos are going saying the blurry [Music] there's another really good reason why you should reduce exposure when taking photos with the illuminated subjects at night and that relates to some of the more technical aspects of - photography namely the shutter speed and ISO so what happens when you reduce exposure is that the shutter speed becomes faster which means it's really likely to get a blurred photo and also the ISO value becomes lower which means that the photo it looks likely to become grainy so by making your night photos a little bit darker not only they not only do they look better but you can also make sure they're higher quality let's word out and there's less a grain so here's another example of the same idea and if you look at the photo now we won't have any problems with blur because the iPhone is on a tripod however you can definitely see some grain in the sky and in general we can improve this photo quite a bit simply if we set exposure on the highlights and then dial it down a little bit and in case you're wondering how much to the kree's exposure my guideline is really simple I want to make sure the black sky indeed appears black and as long as that's happening I don't really have to worry about anything else so I don't want to reduce exposure too much because then we're losing detail and highlights and the bridge doesn't look so good so I don't want to do that but I want to make sure that the black sky still appears black and when that's happening I know I can take a beautiful photo that will not have any unnecessary grain [Music] [Music] in the second part of this video I want to spend some time discussing how you can take beautiful and perfectly sharp iPhone photos of your friends and family and the best thing you can do in low-light situations like this is just find some kind of light source that nicely illuminates your subject for example here we found this interesting light that's positioned just above the subject and what we can use the slide for is to nicely illuminate the subject and it creates this kind of spotlight effect where if you look at this theme what's really happening is that we have the slice donating the subject from the top and we can use the slide to create an interesting creative photo that's also nice and charred and if you look at the screen of my iPhone now the first thing I want to do here is set focus accurately on the face of the subject and what's happening here is that I want to make sure that I really get to focus rides and in low-light situations the iPhone sometimes struggles to focus a little bit so you want to look at the focus carefully and make sure it's set correctly which it is right now so now that we click focus the next thing I want to do is play around with the exposure slider and once again if you reduce exposure what happens is that you get a lower ISO value which means that the photos are less grainy and you also get faster shutter speed which means that the photos are less likely can be learned so when you have that flexibility you want to make the photos a little bit darker or using exposure which is what I just did so now if we look at this scene you'll see that all the light is coming pretty much from the top of the subject and to take advantage of that I'm going to ask my friends actually look up and if she does that we can take this really interesting really neat creative photos in which parts of the subject space are hidden in the shadows which creates mystery but also because of the way the light comes from the top the contour of the face is a little native 9 3 and we can also play around with the framing a little bit and perhaps we can try to include the light source in the photo itself and if we do that we get a different kind of look which is nevertheless interesting for us and now the viewer can really see and appreciate what's happening in the scene so this way we can take a photo that's really creative it looks nice and interesting and that's also beautiful and sharp even though there's practically no life in this dark tunnel where we're taking this photo [Music] occasionally you may find yourself in a situation when there's just no light source you can use to illuminate your subject and what are you doing these situations well ya have three options the first option would be to just take a photo while the flashes turn off and there's still some life in the scene but no matter how we adjust exposure and no matter what we do here you'll see that the scene is still kind of dark and we can't really get a pleasing image because there's just not enough light to work lives so in a situation like this turning on the built-in flash of the iPhone can be a good solution so we're going to do that and for that I'm going to tap on the flash icon and I'm going to turn flash on now the thing to remember is flash on the iPhone is that it only works if your subject is relatively close so if your subject or subjects are within a few feet from you then that's a good time to use the built-in flash of the iPhone so we can do now is try to take another photo and this time the flash is going to turn on so if we look at the photos we just took here we can see the photo without flash and we can clearly see the subject subject is kind of dark and here we have the subject brightly illuminated using the built in flash of the iPhone the problem we have though is that if we look at the iPhone itself you'll see that the flash is located right next to the camera lens and what this means is that essentially the light originates from the exact same angle from which the photo is taken and as a result when you look at the photos we take using the built-in flash of the iPhone what ends up happening is that the face of the subject is going to flash so there are no shadows of any kind in the face and the way to eliminated makes the subject appear kind of a little bit lifeless and you don't really see any shadows in their face and also the light that flash producers is often not flattering to the subject fortunately there is a solution you can use and that solution is using an external unit so the one I'm going to use is called Nova flesh and I happen to like this one a lot but there are different manufacturers who make similar flash units or you can perhaps even experiment with a small flashlight if you don't have one of these external flash units and the way this works is that I actually need to open an app to use this flashlight and that's Nova camera app and that's because this little flash unit connects to my phone using bluetooth so initially I have to pair it and once it's been paired once then every time I open the app the iPhone automatically connects to the flash unit and you can see there's a blue light shining there which means this flash unit is connected and then once I've done that what I then need to do is position the flash unit at a small angle and typically the best way to do this is to essentially position the flash unit up and a little bit to one side so it's kind of like what I'm doing now and so what I'll have to do now is take take a photo and you'll see that as I hit the shutter button the flash units will light up and a photo is then taken so let me try again just to be sure and you can of course vary the angle where you position the flash unit and this will get different results depending on where you position it so if we now look at the photos we've taken using the Nova flash unit you'll see that compared to the photos that we took using the built-in flash the subject looks much better and the shadows on subjects face add an extra depth to the image and in general subject looks more flattering and you can take more beautiful more natural portrait photos in low-light situations using flash units such as the Nova flash so that concludes this video I hope you'll find these techniques useful it can be a bit challenging to take beautiful and sharp photos with your iPhone at night but it can certainly be done as long as you know how to you'll need your photos correctly and how you can work with the light you have available in order to create the kind of photos that you will be happy to share with your friends and family thank you so much for watching I really hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you get a lot of value out of it now there's so much more I'd like to tell you about iPhone photography and while it didn't hold anything back there's only so much I can share with you in a short video like this and that's what I've recorded an entire video course about taking incredible photos with your iPhone so if you'd like to find out more about my full iPhone photography course you'll find more information right under this video so take a look at my full iPhone photography course and I hope to see you there

Channel: iPhone Photography School

Views: 959,930

Keywords: iphone photography, iphone camera, iphone photography school, emil pakarklis, iphone camera tricks, iphone camera features, iphone photography tips, iphone 7, how to use iphone camera, iphone 8, iphone10, iphone, photography, iphoneography, iphone x, apple, photography apps, iphone xr, iphone xs, mobile photography, mobile photography mistakes, mobile photography tips and tricks, smartphone photography, mobile photography hacks, iphone 11, iphone 11 pro, iphone night photos

Id: 6Hkf9v3DYGE

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017