I’ve taught a few photography classes over the years and many times I get questions about using your iPhone for everyday imagery. I LOVE toting just my phone with me. My professional cameras are HEAVY suckers. On our last trip to Disney, I only took my camera with two days. My iPhone was perfect to capture everything I wanted!

Here are my top tricks for great iPhoneography!

Zoom: Don’t zoom, move! iPhone camera quality is great, but you’ll lose sharpness with zooming in. If you have the choice of moving closer, do it!

Flash: Bless your well-meaning hearts, turn it off! I mean that in the nicest way possible. 🙂 Flash is so unflattering. If it’s light outside or you have adequate indoor light, you don’t need it. Tap dark areas of your screen to brighten the image before snapping. Also, flash doesn’t illuminate objects that are far away such as people across a room or…fireworks. Yes, fireworks!?!

Action: iPhones are not the best cameras for capturing fast-paced sports or action. The shutter speed is fairly long, so objects can become blurred easily. However, Burst Mode is helpful. Hold down your camera’s shutter release to take multiple frames of action and choose the best from the series.

Easy on the Filters: if you like to edit your photos, remember a little goes a long way!

Printing: Nothing is as precious as a real photo in your hands. There are some amazing apps out there to get those images off your camera. Some of my favorites are:

Chatbooks: Adorable little photo books for Instagram users via app. You can even categorize your books by hashtags! I have two series that I’ve built up quite the collection;  #lovemynoah and #matthewsdogfarm. The books are automatically mailed to you once a volume is complete. Epic!

Prime Photos from Amazon: I recommend this to all of my clients who have Amazon Prime. Not only does your Prime membership offer free photo storage, but the products are pretty good!

MPix Tap to Print: I admit this app could use a bit of work, but MPix’s quality is outstanding!

So there you have it. A quick crash course in iPhoneography. Have questions? I’m always happy to answer! Leave them in the comments below!