Camera Phones

Camera Phones

by William Lulow

Everyone is using their iPhone or other camera phone these days for snapshots and other documentary purposes, but because of the ease of using these cameras, many people just raise them to their eyes so that they can see the screen better and snap away. They often don’t realize that when they do use them, these cameras make all the decisions about exposure, cropping, highlights and shadow detail for you! Most people don’t know that camera phones can be made to act more like traditional cameras. You can vary most of the same settings on them. And, with the advent of the more recent ones, you actually have three or more lenses built into them.

In this shot, made at night, I was able to hold the camera quite still so as not to have much, if any, blur:

You can actually see the movement of several people in the shot frozen by a fairly fast shutter speed. There was more light here than it appeared. When I tried to make an 11×14 print though, that’s when the quality began to break down a bit.

There are other commercial uses for iPhone and other brand cameras. This shot was made on a location when it would have taken too long to set up a tripod for a regular camera:

As long as you can be careful setting up your camera phone and you know how to use it, it will be useful to do so. One other way I use it is to document lighting setups that I use for teaching purposes:

Here, a simple location shot showing camera, tripod and off-camera light setup. Here is another one showing exact location of lights:

The iPhone really excels at this kind of image. The coating of the lenses is far superior to what it used to be so I can often include the lights in the shot itself with very little, if any image degradation or lens flare.

I will try to write a future blog piece about the various controls on the iPhone.