By year-end, 2025 there were 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 iPhone photography workshop at Sandusky Public Library on Saturday, June 13, from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Or, if you prefer a central Ohio location, I will be conducting a similar workshop at the Dawes Arboretum, near Newark, on Saturday, June 27, from 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
These workshops are classroom sessions 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, so bring your iPhone to the workshop.
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 share some images taken with the new iPhone 17 Pro model, which includes a new 4X to 8X telephoto camera with a longer reach and double the resolution of previous models.
To register for the Sandusky Public Library iPhone photography workshop on June 13, visit their website.
To register for the Dawes Arboretum iPhone photography workshop on June 27, visit their website.