iPhone Macro Love

So recently I had to upgrade my iPhone.

My phone was pretty old school (a 3Gs) and I didn’t think it would be that drastic of a change to upgrade it but oh my goodness….each day I discover something new about how the camera works. I’m falling even more head over heels with it all the time.

Last week was the typical grey and rainy winter weather here in Vancouver.  One of my favourite ways to brighten my spirits on these rainy days is to take photos of water droplets and focus in on the little bits of beauty of the rain.

This was the first time I’d tried this with this new phone was surprised to realize how this new phone has some pretty wicked Macro capabilities…I was totally in awe.  I feel like it is actually pretty close to the kind of macro shot you’d get with a DSLR and a Macro lens…which is kind of mind blowing.  In these shots I’m not using anything extra like those lenses you put on your iPhone (though those look cool) or any sort of app.  This is just using the basic camera on the iPhone5.

Here are a few things I’ve discovered while experimenting with shooting macro with this phone:

Crop In

This was one of my favourite tricks with shooting macro with a macro lens…that often after we take the photo we might notice that there is a part of the photo that we didn’t even see in taking it that has some amazing qualities to it (like an unexpected awesome water droplet).  Some of these photos aren’t their original size but are actually cropped in to focus on one part of the image!  Macro invites us to look at the little things and I find once we take the photo we can look even closer!

Autofocus Lock

This biggest change that I think allows us to capture rockin’ macros with this phone is the Autofocus feature.  It allows you to lock the focus on that one spot so you can move your camera around without it trying to refocus again and again…which ROCKS (and more about this in another post this week as the autofocus lock rocks for even more reasons).

Shoot without Looking 

This is one of my favourite tips I share in the Tips and Tricks for taking Dreamy Photos E-Book.  Its a trick I use for getting my creative juices flowing (and getting out of my left brain)…to take the camera away from your eyes and take photos without composing them.  So often this makes for beautiful unexpected photos.  I especially love doing this with shooting macro…to just get your camera as close as you can and just experiment and with the iPhone it does help to do a shot close up and set the Autofocus Lock and then just have fun with it!

Here are a few more macro shots from the iPhone this week: