How to Take Great Holiday Photos→

The Sweet Setup asked Erin Brooks, a fantastic photographer whose photos have been featured Apple ad campaigns, to update her guide on how to take great holiday photos for 2019. Erin’s advice is extremely practical and can be used by anyone with any camera — from a DSLR with great glass to an iPhone.

In the guide Erin covers pragmatic tips including lighting, composition, location, and how it all can affect the mood of a photo. One I hadn’t thought of before is her tip to get a neat indoor shot by going outside and taking the photo through a window.

By far her best tip, though, is the final one: get in the frame. This is one I am terrible at, and I think many of us are. It is all too easy to be so wrapped up in taking the photos that you end up with none of the photos having you in them. It’s makes me sad in retrospect how few photos there are of me at key family moments.

One way I have tried to do this recently is setting up my iPhone on a small, discreet tripod combined with the Studio Neat Glif, and then using my Apple Watch as a camera remote. If you don’t have an Apple Watch, you can also set up the self-timer on your phone, but it’s a bit harder to get casual photos that way.

The important thing is to have fun, be creative, and get yourself in some of the photos this holiday season.

How to Shoot on iPhone 7→

Apple built a terrific page on its website with a variety of short videos showing how to take better photos with iPhone 7. Each of the 16 videos focuses on one brief lesson, demonstrating a photography tip in 3-5 steps.

The videos are produced well, fun, and above all practical. I think there is at least one technique everyone with an iPhone will benefit from in these videos.

Many of the videos illustrate the use of exposure control, which is a technique I think many people don't know about on iPhone. It is easily one of the best things for anyone to learn to make their photos better, and these videos explain the benefits very well.

My favorites of the videos are How to shoot without flash and How to shoot with street light. They both show how a great photo can be taken in low light without using the obnoxious flash.

Check out the videos and then put them into practice. If you shoot something you are especially proud of, let me know on Twitter.

Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry

I don’t do a great deal of work with images, but when I need something a little more beyond what iPhoto or Aperture can offer, or if I need to make something from scratch, I turn to Pixelmator.

I’ve been using Pixelmator for a few years, and it has always been a better experience than that other pixel-pushing tool from Adobe.

Today, Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry was released, making an already easy to use image editor even easier. It’s ready for both Mountain Lion and the Retina display, includes iCloud document storage support, and features a new effects browser and alignment guides.

Effects always intimidated me because they resided by name only in a menu. I didn’t know what each one did. With the new effects browser I can see what an effect will do before I apply it.

As for alignment guides, this is something I have wanted for a while. Now it is super easy to center or align objects in an image amongst each other. This makes Pixelmator a precision tool.

The Pixelmator team has some great walkthroughs of the new features on their site.

The best part of Pixelmator is the price. It’s just $29.99 $14.99 on the Mac App Store.

Retina iPad Pack

John Carey just released a Retina iPad Pack consisting of 48 of his gorgeous photographs.

You owe it to yourself to go get these for your new iPad.

Shoot First, Focus Later

An outfit called Lytro is touting a camera that supposedly captures the entire field of light in an image. The promise of this camera is that you don't have to focus on a subject first (or really even just one subject). Their gallery demo lets you adjust the focal point of a bunch of images on the fly.

This is seriously neat, and it opens up photography to capture images with multiple contexts. A few things I'd like to know are 1) how quickly the camera can capture the image, 2) how much will it cost, and 3) when will Apple be able to drop it in my iPhone?

"Guess I'm Never Buying Anything from Apple Again"

I've been seeing a lot of stink being raised over a new patent from Apple by the media and especially by folks on Twitter.

The patent covers an idea for an camera system that includes an infrared receiver that can accept data. To sum up some of the uses of this new system, Patently Apple states:

On one side, the new system would go a long way in assisting the music and movie industries by automatically disabling camera functions when trying to photograph or film a movie or concert. On the other hand, the new system could turn your iOS device into a kind of automated tour guide for museums or cityscapes as well as eventually being an auto retail clerk providing customers with price, availability and product information. The technology behind Apple's patent application holds a lot of potential.

And of course, everyone latches onto that first sentence. And only that sentence.

I've seen tweets (well, mostly retweets) in my feed saying things along the lines of "Guess I'm never buying anything from Apple again".

Grow up, people.

It's a patent. Do you have any idea how many patents Apple files in a year? Enough to keep a site like Patently Apple in business. Now, with that scale in mind, how many of those patents make it into an actual shipping product? Not many.

With this in mind, let's save the outrage for if this system is ever implemented, and in an evil way. Otherwise, knock it off.

Camera+ Returns to the App Store

Camera+ has returned to the App Store this evening sporting a version number of 2.0. You may remember Camera+ for the controversy it stirred with Apple when the developers unveiled a way to reassign an iPhone’s volume buttons to act as shutter triggers when running the app. It is unknown whether Apple outright pulled the app from the App Store, or if the developers pulled it to avoid banishment or something of the like.

Nonetheless, it is back with a laundry list of improvements. What I’m liking the best so far is the removal of the silly SLR interface that used to greet you upon launch. Now the app gets you from launch to taking a picture extremely quickly. Everything else, so far, seems mostly like polish, polish, polish.

To celebrate the app’s return, it’s on sale for a whopping 99¢ right now. Owners of 1.x need not fret, 2.0 is a free update.

HDR Photos on the iPhone 4

One of my favorite features of the recently released iOS 4.1 update is HDR photos on the iPhone 4. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and Wikipedia explains it as such:

[...]high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

Basically, if a beautiful blue sky is blown out to white in a normally exposed photograph, an HDR of the same scene, composed of three shots at different exposures, will more than likely show the sky along with the rest of the scene.

As an example, examine the differences in this photo I took between the normal, single shot exposure on top and the three-exposure HDR of the same scene below.

Normally, it is a time-consuming process to create HDR photos, at least for beginners. I would throw myself in this category. But the iPhone 4 is automatically taking care of all the messy stuff. Just click the HDR On toggle in the Camera app, tap to focus, then take the shot. The iPhone 4 will automatically take three exposures, and then mesh them together into an HDR. The is a preference in the Camera section of Settings.app on your iPhone to save the original exposure. It is on by default.

The camera on the iPhone 4 was already one of my favorite features, but built-in, easy as pie HDR has added just that much more value. If you have an iPhone 4 and haven’t played with HDR yet, shame on you.