iPhone® For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 8. "Smile": Taking Pictures with Your iPhone

In This Chapter

• Taking pictures

• Focusing your shot

• Importing your pictures

• Viewing and admiring pictures

• Creating a slideshow

• Adding stunts for your photos

• Finding pictures by face, event, and place

Camera phones may outsell dedicated digital cameras nowadays, but with relatively few exceptions, camera phones are rather mediocre picture takers. Come to think of it, most mobile phones don't show off digital images all that well, either.

Of course, most mobile phones aren't iPhones.

The device you have recently purchased (or are lusting after) is a spectacular photo viewer. And though its built-in digital camera isn't the one we'd rely on for snapping pictures during an African safari or even your kid's fast-paced soccer game, the iPhone in your steady hands can produce perfectly acceptable photos.

What's more, the picture keeps getting better and better. The iPhone 4 has not one camera, but two: a 5-megapixel autofocus camera on the rear, and a VGA camera on the front. The latter is used for FaceTime video (see Chapter 4) and for taking, dare we say, rather snappy self-portraits. The iPhone 4 also has an LED flash, the first iPhone with such a built-in nicety.

Over the next few pages, you discover how best to exploit the iPhone's camera — or in the case of iPhone 4, cameras. We then move on to the real magic — making the digital photos that ...