Capture a Portrait
To understand the iPhone’s Portrait mode, we must first talk about aperture. In most cameras, the aperture is the mechanical part of a lens that opens to let in outside light to be recorded on the image sensor. Changing how wide or narrow the aperture opens determines how much light reaches the sensor.
iPhone cameras, due to their small sizes, simply do not include aperture mechanisms. Each camera has a single fixed aperture that indicates how much light passes through the lens elements to the sensor.
So why bring up aperture in the context of making a portrait photo? Because one characteristic of much portrait photography is the background blur behind the subject (Figure 49).
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