iPhone, the ultimate camera?

Portrait mode is the single most useful mode on the iPhone, and I use it almost exclusively for photos of people. It gives you genuinely high quality, pleasing portraits, with the kind of soft background that used to mean carrying a fast lens. Here is the exact setup I use to get the best out of it.

1. Start in Portrait mode before you frame the shot.
2. Set the depth to f/10 or f/11. That is the sweet spot for me. Anything lower blurs the background too much, and on a phone that can look unnatural, though it has improved. f/10 or f/11 keeps the blur believable.
3. Switch the lighting from Natural to Studio Light. It is excellent for faces, and you can dial its intensity up or down to taste.
4. Shoot at 2x. The tighter framing is the classic portrait look and flatters most faces.

That combination, Portrait mode at f/10 to f/11, Studio Light, and 2x, is what really takes advantage of the iPhone camera for people. It has become my default whenever I photograph someone.

The second technique is learning to edit properly in the Photos app. It does far more than people expect, but the feature that saves me the most time is copying and pasting edits.

Edit one photo in a set the way you want it, then copy those edits and paste them onto the rest of the batch in one go. Every shot from the same scene gets the same look in seconds instead of one at a time. If you shoot a series in similar light, this alone will save you loads of time, and it is the habit I would learn first.

The third is getting comfortable with night mode. iPhones, and the 17 especially, take excellent night shots, and you do not need a tripod to get them.

You can handhold night mode, but the trick is to give the phone something to rest on. Prop it against a wall, a railing, or a ledge, anything steady, and let it take the few seconds it asks for. On a recent trip to Chicago I got some of my favorite night shots just by setting the phone down on whatever was around, with no tripod at all. Honestly, some of them rival or beat what I have taken with my Sony Alpha.

When I want to go further, I use an app called Spectre. It makes multi second exposures easy, which is how you get motion blur and light trails: smooth water, streaking traffic, that sort of thing, all handheld.