Take Control of
iPhone Photography

Apple’s marketing for the iPhone always emphasizes the cameras over most other features. And it’s true: iPhones have fantastic cameras, made even better by hardware and software that analyzes and improves your images as you take them. That makes your snapshots look better, but an iPhone can do so much more. Using the iPhone as a camera, you can create professional portraits and landscapes, capture stunning close-ups and remarkable low-light images, and even record cinema-quality video.

Photographer Jeff Carlson has spent decades honing his craft, and he brings his expertise with photography and Apple equipment together in this definitive guide to iPhone photography. Whether you’re a casual photographer wanting to get the best-quality photos or someone with lot photographic experience who wants greater control over the iPhone’s cameras, this book has all the information you need.

In this book, you’ll learn:

• All the details of Apple’s Camera app and the iPhone’s numerous options for triggering the shutter
• The best ways to compose your photographs to get the effect you want
• How to take better selfies
• What you can do to control the exposure and change the zoom level
• The differences between optical zoom and digital zoom and how the iPhone cameras handle each
• When and why to capture raw images
• Options for capturing images in low light, such as Night Mode and the built-in LED flash
• What to do when you want an extreme close-up (macro) image
• Approaches to taking better portraits, including Apple’s Portrait Mode and Portrait Lighting
• How to create a panoramic photo in either horizontal or vertical orientation
• Why and how to create a Live Photo that features a few seconds of video
• Ways you can alter a photo’s appearance with Filters and Photographic Styles
• The details of Apple’s file formats available for photos and videos, including HEIC, JPEG, ProRAW, HEVC, and H.264
• How aspect ratio, resolution, file format, and (for video) frame rate affect the size and quality of images
• Numerous ways in which you can adjust settings to customize camera behavior
• How to record video with your iPhone in standard, Slo-Mo, Time-Lapse, and Cinematic modes
• What third-party apps and accessories can do to enhance your photography even further

This book covers the iPhone 12 and newer models, including the iPhone 15 series and the iPhone SE (3rd generation).

This richly illustrated book contains enough details to satisfy the most tech-savvy user, while also making the process of photography simple, accessible, and fun for beginners.

Tip: To learn about Apple’s Photos app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, which provides tools to organize, sync, share, and edit your photos and videos, read Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos. If you want help sorting through vast numbers of photos, categorizing them, picking the best ones, and developing a reliable and easy-to-use organizational strategy (on any platform, with any of numerous tools), read Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Your Digital Photos.

About Jeff Carlson

Author and photographer Jeff Carlson (@jeffcarlson@twit.social on Mastodon, @jeffcarlson on Instagram and Threads) is a contributing editor at TidBITS, plus he writes for publications such as DPReview, Macworld, and CreativePro. He is the author of Take Control of Apple Watch, Take Control of Your Digital Storage, and Take Control of Managing Your Files, among many other books, including Adobe Lightroom: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features (Rocky Nook). He believes there’s never enough coffee and does his best to test that theory.