By year-end, 2025 there will be about 18 billion cell phones world-wide. Baby boomers like me spend about 3-1/2 hours each 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.
Smartphone 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 iPhone photos to stand out from the crowd you’ll need to devote some time to learning the best camera settings for your iPhone 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 Western Reserve Land Conservancy’s headquarters in Moreland Hills, Ohio on Wednesday, August 20, from 4:00 pm to 7:00 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 box dinner and a photo shoot with your iPhone in the Western Reserve Land Conservancy gardens, which offer many 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 camera each year, and I will preview the new iPhone 17 Pro models, which will include a new telephoto camera with a longer reach and double the resolution of previous models.
To register for this workshop, visit the Western Reserve Land Conservancy website.
If you are unable to attend this WRLC workshop, a similar program is being offered at The Holden Arboretum on Saturday, August 9. Here’s a link to more information on the Holden Forests and Gardens website.