By year-end, 2025 there will be 18 billion cell phones world-wide. Baby boomers like me spend about 3-1/2 hours every day staring at the screens of our phones, and the average teenager’s daily screen time is more than 6 hours. About 5 billion photographs are uploaded to cyberspace each day, most of them taken with smart phones.
Smart phone cameras are much easier to use than digital SLR or mirrorless Nikon, Canon, or Sony cameras, which typically have instruction manuals that are hundreds of pages in length. It’s easy to take a snapshot with your smart phone, but if you want your photos to stand out from the crowd you’ll need to devote some time to learning the best camera settings for your smart phone and the basics of good lighting and composition in outdoor photography.
To help you acquire some of these skills, join me for an afternoon/evening iPhone photography workshop at the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio on Saturday, August 9, from 4:00 pm to 7:30 pm. We’ll begin with a 1-1/2 hour classroom session in which we will cover the following topics:
- The best iPhone camera settings for outdoor photography;
- Attributes of a great landscape/nature photograph;
- Focusing and exposure control;
- Adjusting focus point and depth-of-field using portrait mode;
- Close-up and macro photography;
- Panoramas with your iPhone;
- Lighting and composition guidelines;
- Waterfalls and low light/night photography;
- iPhone apps and accessories;
- Organizing, storing, and editing your iPhone photos.
A variety of hands-on exercises are included in the classroom session, followed by a two-hour photo shoot with your iPhone in Holden’s Butterfly and Display Gardens, which offer a myriad of excellent subjects for smart phone photography practice.
Current iPhones have some limitations for wildlife photography, but Apple is improving the performance of the iPhone’s telephoto cameras each year, and I will preview the new iPhone 17 Pro models, which will include a telephoto camera with double the resolution of previous models.
To register for this workshop, visit the Holden Forests & Gardens website.