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iPhone Camera App Walkthrough // Mobile Photography for Beginners Pt. 2
In this second episode of my series on Mobile Photography for Beginners, I will do a complete walkthrough of the iOS Camera app on an iPhone 12 Mini. You will learn every important button and setting to start taking amazing photos with your phone!
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:13 - Quickest way to open the app
00:26 - Switching between cameras
00:42 - Using the zoom
01:11 - Focus & Exposure
02:04 - Camera Settings
03:37 - Portrait Mode
04:35 - Panorama Mode
04:45 - Video Mode
05:26 - Slow Motion Mode
05:47 - Time-Lapse Mode
06:03 - Night Mode
06:49 - Advanced Settings
07:57 - Conclusion
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- Welcome to my second episode on my series on Mobile Photography for Beginners. In this episode, we're gonna do a complete walk through of the iOS Camera App on the iPhone 12 Mini. Let's roll the intro. (wind whooshing) (water flowing) I'm Loic Alford, and let's get started right away by opening the Camera app. The quickest way to open the camera from wherever you are inside of the phone is to use your menu from the top, so slide down from the top, and then access on the camera icon right here. It's gonna open your main camera facing backwards and if possible, always use that one. If you wanna use your front facing camera, you can use the option at the bottom right corner, right here to turn around the camera. But it's always better to use the back camera, because again, I get better image quality from it. If you wanna change between different lenses of the back camera on your iPhone, you can click on the little one times icon here. And it switch between the wide angle and the normal camera here, and if you ever took a photo, it's gonna switch between that one, too. If you wanna zoom in, you can simply long press this a little option, and then you can zoom and get exactly the zoom you want. So either wider or more zoomed in, if you wanna zoom inside of your shot, I suggest you don't do it directly on the phone and the way to do it afterwards in post-processing by cropping the shot because you're gonna get better image quality when doing that. The next option is one that most people don't really understand is that when you click on the image, it's gonna set the focus and the exposure automatically based on the place where you click. So if you click on one part of the image, it's gonna make sure that part is perfectly sharp, so that's what his focus. It is also gonna set the exposure and the exposure is basically, how bright or how dark that part of the image is. It's automatically choose the best settings to make sure they can see it well. If you wanna lock that thing, so you don't want it to change all the time when you're turning around the phone, because each time you turn around the phone, you have to click again. You can actually click on that part of the image and then long press, and you're gonna have an option that's gonna say AE/AF lock is on. So now even if you turn around, it's still gonna be using that exposure. To remove this mode, simply click again on the square and you're back on the auto mode, but now if you turn again, you're gonna have to change it each time you wanna change your focus or change the exposure. Now let's look at some of the menu options. So if you come at the top here and we click on the little icon here, we're gonna have more options that are gonna appear at the bottom of this screen. So first of all, we have our flash option. So it's better to leave it off most of the times, because if you put it on, I think that the results coming from a cell phone and there's flash on a cell phone, usually don't look very natural. So I just prefer living it off all the time. Then if you look at live photos, I also leave this one off because it takes a little three-second video before and after taking the shot, but it takes so much space and most of the times, especially when taking landscape photos or things like that, it's not very useful in the end. It's different if you have a pet or if you have children and things like that, and reliving these small memories can be useful, but for most people, it's just not worth it. Then you have your aspect ratio. So you should leave it to the default, which is 4:3, but if you change it to square or 16:9, and you come back and decide afterwards that you took your shot, you wanna reframe it, Apple actually saved the full file, whatever you choose here. So you can go back without loosing any quality if you need to, so that's a pretty good, cool thing to know. The next option here is exposure. So if you wanna make your image darker or brighter, that's where you can do it. You can bring it down to make it darker or bringing up to make it brighter. Now, if you go back here, the next option is a timer, which is pretty useful. If you wanna make sure to take a picture of a group or something like that. And finally, the last one here, our looks, I personally wouldn't use the looks that are built in right away, because you're better to do it afterwards in editing. So now if we come back to our options here, we're gonna close. To close the menu, we have a button right here, we're gonna click again on the little icon at the top, and then we're gonna move to our next mode. So the next mode right here is portrait mode. So if we'll open here and we have a person in front, so we're gonna move on the selfie camera to have it enabled, it's gonna detect my face automatically and track it for us. And then we can simply take a picture here, and we're gonna have a nice blur in the background. What is really important to understand is that the blur in the background is not natural blur, it's a blur that's created using AI. So that's why sometimes it has a hard time with our hairs or things like that around your subject. Another pretty important thing to understand on the iPhone camera is that it's really optimized for faces and pets, so if you tried taking pictures of flowers or any things like that, the portrait mode might not work at all afterwards. There are also different options here if you wanna change the type of light that you have. So you can have a studio light, you can have a contour light. So these are all kinds of different lights, but I prefer just leaving it on natural light when I'm outside, because that's the type of light that we already have. But if you're inside and you're trying to take some pictures that look a little bit more like if you were in studio, the other modes can be pretty useful. And if you move on to the Pano mode, that's a mode that most people know quite well. So you can simply click on the button and start taking the Panorama of what is in front of you. If we move on to our other slides, so if we slide down there are more options right here, we can go back inside of our video mode. So by default, it's on HD 30 frames per second and I personally would leave it on that because that's the quality, that's the best when looking at the videos on your phone. But if you're gonna be looking at them on your 4K TV, you can actually click on the little option at the top right corner right here and enable 4K mode. We could also change the frame rate to get different types of frame rates. But if you don't know much about video, just leave it at 1080P, which is HD and 30 frames per second and that's gonna be the best settings, probably for most people. If you look at the top left corner, we also have an option to enable or disable the video light. But again, it's not the best quality of light, so I usually don't use it that much. Then if you look at the other options here, we have slow motion video. So it is important to understand is that if we have on the top right corner, 720P 440 frames per second, 720P is even worse quality than 1080P, so I would not, probably more used that mode as HD, 120 frames per second, which is here, offer pretty good slow motion, but in better video quality. Finally, we have a time lapse mode. And if you don't know what is time lapse mode, it's basically everything that is spinning up. So everything is going much faster. So this is great if you're walking around, if you're doing a character or whatever you're might be doing, that can be great to really show something that took a lot of time to film, but in a much faster way. The next one I wanna talk about is the night mode. And for this, you want it to be dark outside, which is not the case right now. So I'm just simply gonna block it, to treat the camera in to thinking it's much darker than it is. Then if you look at the top left corner here, we're gonna have an option to select how long the picture we're taking should be. So if the longer it is in terms of second, the more the camera's gonna be stable. So if you're taking a ten second shot, you're gonna get better results at night, but the camera needs to be perfectly steady. So for this, you should hold it with two hands and having your arms on your body to get the best results. If you wanna get the best results, when using this mode, you definitely need to be using a tripod, and this is gonna allow you to get even longer exposures up to 40 seconds and get some pictures of the stars or things like that. That can be pretty cool. Now, the next thing we're gonna look at is actually the more advanced settings. And for this, we have to go back to our main menu here, go inside the settings app, go down here, find our camera option. And then we're gonna see that we have a few other options. So the first one we're gonna look at here is format. And it's probably better to leave it on most compatible because Apple has a format that works great for their products, but doesn't always work good with people that have older phones or their computers that are not Mac computer. So using on most compatible is gonna make the files a bit bigger, but easier to read on different types of devices. Then we have our recruit options, which are the same ones that we had in the menu, right before. The other ones, I'm not gonna go through all the options here. We can just leave most of defaults on and you're gonna be good, but one you wanna have on is the grid. So the grid is really gonna help when taking pictures and videos. Now you wanna make sure that the option view outside the frame is actually off because if you leave it on, it's gonna show you something that's a little bit bigger than what the final image is gonna be. So by disabling this, you actually seeing what you're gonna get in the final results. All the other options we're gonna leave them on because they're all the options that are make the camera smart and make the better decisions when taking the images. I hope you enjoyed this little iOS camera walkthrough. And I wanna say big, thank you to my friend, Gabrielle for allowing me to use her phone to make this video. If you did enjoy this video, please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe to the channel for more content on mobile photography for beginners. See you in the next one. Bye-bye. (upbeat music)
Video Links
- 👉 OTHER EPISODES
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
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What is this video about?
Welcome back to the second episode of my Mobile Photography for Beginners series! In this video, I'm doing a complete walkthrough of the iOS Camera app on an iPhone 12 Mini so you can understand exactly how to use every button, setting, and feature to take better photos right away.
We start with the basics: the quickest way to open the camera from anywhere on your phone (spoiler: it's the Control Center), and how to switch between the front-facing and back cameras. I explain why the back camera is always your best bet for image quality, and then we dive into the different lenses available on the iPhone—the wide angle, normal, and telephoto options.
One of the most important concepts I cover is focus and exposure. When you tap on the screen, you're telling the camera where to focus and how to expose the image. I show you how to lock these settings using the AE/AF lock feature, which keeps your focus and exposure constant even as you move the phone around. This is a game-changer for taking consistent shots.
Then we go through the camera settings menu: flash (I recommend leaving it off), live photos (useful for pets and kids, but eats storage), aspect ratio (4:3 is the default, but Apple saves the full file so you can reframe later), exposure compensation, timer, and built-in filters (which I skip in favor of editing later).
I walk through each shooting mode: portrait mode with its AI-powered background blur and different lighting styles, panorama, video (I recommend 1080p at 30fps), slow motion, time-lapse, and night mode—which lets you capture incredible low-light photos if you use a tripod for longer exposures.
Finally, we explore the advanced camera settings in the Settings app. I highlight a few essentials: keeping the format on "most compatible" for wider device compatibility, enabling the grid to help with composition, and making sure "view outside the frame" is turned off so you see exactly what you'll capture.