Smartphone Photography

All my life I’ve been an Android user. I started with the Galaxy series and it’s all I ever used. I loved the customization and camera features that Android had and the iPhone did not.

Everyone always bragged about how great their iPhone was and how awesome iMessage was, but I never understood. Last year my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, as well as some of my friends, finally convinced me to get an iPhone. At first I hated it, with its lack of customization and inability to tweak camera settings natively, but then I learned what live photo was and how to use it and my attitude changed.

Live photo takes a photo, then records a second or two after the photo is taken. You can use it for a few different things, but I love it because it allows me to create long exposure photos. Here’s an example, just a standard waterfall photo that I took using live photo:

Turning live photo on, this is the result I get:

If you’ve got steady hands this works well, or you can buy a tripod for your phone (come on Santa, pull through this year).

Here’s another example of this effect that I took last night while at a light show with my wife. I started with the photo below:

And I turned it into a live photo:

I didn’t like the look of the water drops in the live photo, but I liked the way the ferris wheel turned out, so I had to get creative.

Using Photoshop Mix on my phone, I opened the two pictures up as layers. I removed the long exposure ferris wheel from the second photo and added it to the first to create the photo below:

As you can see, the water drops are less blurry than in the long exposure photo, and it’s a pretty cool looking image. The fact that this is a picture from my phone is also crazy to me, as it’s neat to see how far phone photography has come over the years.

Get out there and see what the camera on your phone can do, and show me the results!

Ryan