iPhone portrait photo guide

Take amazing portraits by day or night

- Written by George Cairns

As we head into the festive season and New Year celebrations, there will be plenty of photo opportunities to enjoy with friends, family, and work colleagues. Your ever-present iPhone is most likely going to be your best camera, both for instant access and quality, especially when it comes to capturing stunning portraits of the people in your life.

This feature is packed full of tips, tricks, and techniques to help you make the most of the iPhone Camera app’s many shooting modes. We’ll also look at how your iPhone’s various built-in lenses quickly give you a wide range of compositional choices (without having to pause and swap lenses like you do with a bulky Digital SLR camera).

As the nights get longer you’ll face the challenge of shooting people in low light, so we’ve devoted two pages to capturing colourful low-light portraits. We also recommend some third-party gadgets (such as portable LED lights) to improve the quality of low-light shots, as well as adding three-dimensional ‘modeling’ to a subject’s face.

Your iPhone is a one-stop shop! As well as capturing portraits it enables you to change their colors, tones, and composition in its digital darkroom – the Photos app. We’ll explore wide range of post-production techniques (such as adding background blur) to help make your portraits look more like the work of a professional photographer. Your edited portraits will then catch the eye (and the ‘likes’) of friends and followers when you use the iPhone to share your shots via social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, or X (formerly known as Twitter).

The Camera app interface explained

1 Portrait mode