Throughout this course, I have been investigating much of what an iPhone camera is capable of doing and other supports in developing these photos.

As a recap, I began brainstorming and started my first endeavor by looking into how to better my landscape photography.

  • My biggest takeaway was changing the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9. This gave a wider picture, removing the monotonous parts often found on the top and bottom of the photos.

I then moved on to night photography. Here I learned to:

  • use a tripod to increase the exposure time
  • and learn how I can play with how the photo will turn out such as “painting with light.”

Next up was portraits. My phone offers a portrait mode which I then could try some things out. I tried:

  • changing the lighting effect
  • and making additional editing changes following on the camera app.

I have always liked the people who can stage a photo and make some very visually appealing pictures. I tried my hand at that next. Some takeaways were:

  • knowing what or who your theme and subject are,
  • being mindful of lines and angles,
  • know what is in the frame,
  • and that this is also known as flatlay (a helpful key word to find resources about this).

Close ups were my next up on my list. Some of the things that I took away from my research were:

  • be mindful of the light,
  • stay steady,
  • focus on one detail,
  • try different angles,
  • and find the closest distance it is still in focus, then zoom in 2x.

When the snow started to fall, I really wanted to try and see if I could get a nice picture of the falling snowflakes. To do this, I knew I would have to adjust the shutter speed. My phone camera does not allow for you to adjust it as is, it requires an outside source to do that. So I found and downloaded Lightroom. While I did not have much success with getting a photo of the snowfall, I do think that it could be useful in other circumstances.

The final thing that I looked into was creating a carousel post. It is quite a common template used for posting on social media, but was something that I had never done before. This also required an outside app (SCRL) where I could then upload my creation or save it as a video and/or separate photos.

To display my learning and summary, I created a canva presentation. A link to my canva presentation can be found here.

Overall, it was really nice to have an opportunity to use my time and energy in doing and discovering something that I am interested in and getting credit for it. I loved learning about something so applicable and it is always at my fingertips!