Experiment

By Adrian Toon, director of a2n.

Our phones have become exceptional image-capturing devices, and where the content taken from impossibly small cameras do lack in quality, they certainly make up for this on the software front.

For example, HDR (high dynamic range) capture is built in today, which offers very good balances between sky and subject offering natural-looking images.

There are lots of other ‘tips and tricks’ online that you can easily access to make your photography just that little different, and hopefully make your pictures stand out. One such trick is to take long exposure pictures without a tripod. A long exposure picture offers a blur to anything moving such as a working machine, fountain or moving car lights at dusk.

On an iPhone you do not need to add an app for this type of image-capture as it is built into the camera software. To take slow exposure image, first ensure that you have ‘Live Photo’ switched on. This ensures your camera takes 1.5 seconds of video before and after the shutter is pressed to create a still image.

So, line up your picture, holding the camera steady as possible for a couple of seconds before and after the shutter is released.

Once captured, go to the Photos app and open the live photo taken, swipe up on the photo and you’ll see ‘live, loop, bounce, etc, in the effects section. Swipe across the effects and tap ‘long exposure’. This then merges all the video frames taken into one image.

With a bit of experimentation and practice the results can be very effective and help make your image stand out when submitting copy for press release.