iPhone® Photography & Video For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Adjusting to Your Photo Environment

In This Chapter

• External factors that affect photography

• Making light work for you

• Focusing on what's important

• Working with exposure and white balance

You may be wondering what I mean by "your photo environment." A typical photo environment includes a variety of conditions, the most important of which is lighting. Light plays a dramatic and critical role in photography, and the main lighting environments are indoors or outside.

When you're indoors, you can change the lighting to be more favorable. Outdoors, you're pretty much at the mercy of the elements, but that doesn't mean you're completely helpless. If you take a lot of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment photos, making quick adjustments to your environment is essential to capturing a good photograph. Before you can adjust for external factors though, you have to know what to adjust and why.

Depending on which model of iPhone you have, your bag of tricks for obtaining a good photo under less-than-ideal circumstances varies. In this chapter, I show you how to take advantage of the tools you have and what you can do to make up for the tools you lack.

I also show you how to use the Rule of Thirds to enhance your photo compositions and give them more impact, whether you're at a birthday party or on a "once in a lifetime" scenic vacation. And the Rule of Thirds isn't dependant on lighting or weather; ...