How To Change Shutter Speed On iPhone

Use A Slow Shutter Speed For Stunning Long Exposure Photos

In this section, youll learn how to capture incredible long exposure photos using two different apps: Camera+ 2 and Slow Shutter Cam;.

Both apps produce great results, but they offer slightly different functionality.

Before you begin, make sure you have an iPhone tripod.;A tripod keeps your camera perfectly still during the long exposure time.

If you hand-hold your iPhone, you wont be able to keep it still enough. And the result will be a shaky photo thats entirely blurred.

Use Portrait Mode To Blur The Background In Your Photos

Does your iPhone camera have Portrait mode? If so, you can use it to shoot stunning photos with dreamy, blurred backgrounds.

Portrait mode is perfect for shooting professional-looking portrait photos.

But you can also use it to blur the background behind other subjects.

Heres how to capture beautifully blurred backgrounds with Portrait mode:

Open the built-in iPhone;Camera;app, then select;Portrait mode at the bottom of the screen.

Ensure the subject is between two and eight feet from the camera. If youre too close or too far away, youll see a message telling you to change your distance.

When the camera has focused on the subject and blurred the background, youll see the words;Natural Light;in yellow.

Now, tap the shutter button to take a beautiful photo with a soft, blurred background. It really is that easy!

If you have one of the newer iPhones , you can do even more with Portrait mode.

These iPhones allow you to adjust the strength of the background blur after taking your photo.

This offers a huge amount of creative control.

To adjust the blur strength, open your portrait photo in the;;app, then tap;Edit.

Tap the;f/number;icon at the top left of the screen.

Youll now see the Depth slider beneath your photo. Drag the slider left or right to adjust the strength of the;background blur.

Tap;Done;to save the changes.

As you can see, Portrait mode offers an easy way to create a shallow depth of field in your photos.

But what if you dont have Portrait mode on your iPhone?

Slide To The Left For Burst Mode

Slide the Shutter button ;to the left and hold it to take a burst of photos, then release it to stop.

With iOS 14, you can capture photos in burst mode by pressing the Volume up button. Just go to Settings > Camera and turn on Use Volume Up for Burst.

* To take videos with customizable resolution, stereo audio, and audio zoom, switch to Video mode.

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How To Edit Star Trail Photos With Lightroom For Ios

Adobe Lightroom is a mobile photo editing app that is free to download and use. There are several premium options available at different price points. If you use Adobe Lightroom for desktop, the premium plan for the app is included in your subscription.

Ready to try your hand at editing star trail photos? Heres a simple method using the Lightroom app.

Understand The Relationship Between Shutter Speed And Exposure

In its most obvious sense, what your shutter speed does is to make your photos appear dark or bright. Your shutter speed has something to do with your exposure. How? Well, your shutter speed affects the amount of light that you capture.;

To make things clearer, the long shutter speed will make your image brighter while a short shutter speed will make your image darker. This means that the brightness of the photos you take greatly depends on the amount of time your camera sensors are exposed.;

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Depth Of Field: How To Blur The Background In Your Photos

Do you want to shoot professional-looking iPhone photos with beautiful out-of-focus backgrounds?

Creating a shallow depth of field is a great way to make your subject stand out. And its perfect for blurring out a distracting background.

Shallow depth of field photos are typically associated with DSLR cameras. But did you know its easy to blur the background in your iPhone photos?

On a DSLR camera, you control the depth of field by adjusting the aperture . However, the iPhone aperture cant be changed.

Read on, and discover two easy ways to shoot stunning images with beautifully blurred backgrounds.

Shutter Speed And Camera Shake

A slow shutter speed can be used to blur action in your photo, but only if you hold the camera steady enough to keep the rest of the picture sharp. If you wobble, then then entire image is blurred. This is called camera shake, and is almost always something to be avoided.

The best antidote to camera shake is a tripod, or a faster shutter speed. You can also practice holding the camera steady. This is tricky with an iPhone, as you usually hold it at arms length. With a regular camera, you can keep your elbows tight to your sides as you peer through the viewfinder.

There are other aspects of shutter speed you might want to look into. How it works with flash, for example. But for iPhone photography, the above covers most of what you need to know. If you want to experiment with setting the shutter speed yourself, youll need a manual camera app to do it, or just dig out your old camera. Lightroom is my favorite iPhone camera app right now, and Halide is also pretty good. Have fun.

Any questions about iPhone shutter speed or other photo topics? Ask me on or Micro.blog.

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Applying And Celebrating Exposure

You might be a quick learner and immediately and conceptually grasp the concept of exposure. Thats awesome. Good for you! But know this understanding and applying the concept of exposure are two very different things. Understanding may be immediate but applying it will be a lifelong pursuit, and a very fulfilling one at that.

Even after all these years of shooting commercial photography with almost every camera known to man, I am still intrigued and infatuated by the photographic concept of exposure. The science of photography, over the years, hasnt really changed that much. Optimum exposure has been and always will be a delicate combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. And while the technology hasnt changed, the art of photography surely has. Learn how to express your art through exposure. Click away!

How To Change Shutter Speed On iPhone

The built-in iPhone Camera app doesnt have a shutter speed option. So youll need a third-party app with iPhone manual camera controls.

There are several excellent iPhone camera apps that let you control shutter speed.

Camera+ 2 is a great option as it has a wide range of shutter speeds from very fast to very slow. It even has a dedicated Slow Shutter shooting mode for capturing long exposure photos.

Heres how you change shutter speed on iPhone using Camera+ 2:

Open the;Camera+ 2 app. Set the shooting mode at the top of the screen to Manual.

Next, tap the Shutter Speed icon just above the shutter button .

The Shutter Speed slider will appear at the bottom of the viewfinder. Drag the slider left or right to adjust the shutter speed.

The further left you go, the faster the shutter speed will be. Fast shutter speeds freeze the motion of moving subjects and help eliminate camera shake.

The further right you go, the slower the shutter speed becomes. Slow shutter speeds blur the motion of moving subjects.

Note that the slowest shutter speed in Manual shooting mode is 1 second. If you want to shoot long exposure photos with Camera+ 2, youll probably need slower shutter speeds than this.

Read on to learn how to shoot beautiful long exposure photos with your iPhone.

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How To Shoot Long Exposure Photos Using Camera+ 2

The Camera+ 2 app has a dedicated Slow Shutter mode for shooting long exposure photos.

Set the shooting mode; at the top of the screen to Slow Shutter.

At the bottom of the viewfinder, youll see two sliders. The left slider controls shutter speed.

Drag the;Shutter Speed slider to set the shutter speed value, e.g. 2 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, etc.;The longer the shutter speed, the more blurred any motion will appear.

If you want to adjust exposure , use the right-hand slider with the Sun icon.

When you tap the shutter button to take your shot, ensure the camera remains perfectly still while the photo is being taken.

Shutter Speed For Portraits

Finding the right shutter speed for iPhone photography portraits takes practice to find the right balance of the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Adjust one, and youll have to compensate by adjusting one of the other factors.

Ensure the shutter speed is fast enough to eliminate camera shake if holding the camera by hand and subject movement if using a tripod.; Again, making adjustments to these elements will only help your knowledge of them. Your command of them will show in your end results.;;

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How To Capture Motion

Soft, velvet-like motion blur looks creamy and adds significant demension to your shot.This particular type of motion blur is accomplished when the subject is slightly moving through the frame during its set exposure. Shutter speed for this type of photograph are set low, low, low.;

Its best to grab the tripod for this one when used with just a hand, you might inadvertently shake the camera to the point of no return.

Shutter speed can be a struggle for beginner photographers, but with the right amount of practice, youll be copping better, more creative images. The wide shutter speed range allows any artist the flexibility to capture a wide variety of shots.

Now get out there and show us what you got!;Tag;;and;#momentcamera;on Instagram;when using the;;app;for a chance to be featured.

What Can You Do When It’s Not Bright Outside

Good question and the answer is tricky…

Since we’ve already explained that the iPhone sensor needs light to get some sort of exposure and that your ISO will automatically try to remain low while the shutter speed slows down, for example, ISO 25/1000s, ISO 25/500s, ISO 25/250s, ISO 25/125s, and on and on…

It stands to reason that the slower the shutter speed, the crisper the photo with low ISO, so what if you kept the ISO constant and just messed around with the shutter speed? Exactly!

Your iPhone is really smart, because once the shutter speed reduces to the point that it’s possible to get a high-quality photo, then the ISO also begins to increase. It can even go all the way up to an ISO of 2000! But that’s where you have to be careful, because again the higher the ISO, the higher the likelihood of noise.

Try this:

Keep your ISO constant and reduce your shutter speed, i.e 1/50, 1/25, 1/20, etc. and take test shots as you reduce your iPhone’s shutter speed. When all else fails, just get an app.

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Fast Slow And Long Shutter Speeds

A fast shutter speed is typically whatever it takes to freeze action. If you are photographing birds, that may be 1/1000th second or faster. However, for general photography of slower-moving subjects, you might be able to take pictures at 1/200th second, 1/100th second, or even longer without introducing motion blur.

Long shutter speeds are typically above 1 second at which point, you will need to use a tripod to get sharp images. You would use long shutter speeds for certain types of low-light / night photography, or to capture movement intentionally. If anything in your scene is moving when you use long shutter speeds, it will appear very blurry.

In between, shutter speeds from 1/100th second to 1 second are still considered relatively slow. You may not be able to handle them without introducing camera shake from your hands, especially close to the one-second mark.

Also, this strongly depends upon your lens. Some lenses, such as the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8, have specific image stabilization technologies within the lens that can help photographers take pictures at very slow shutter speeds when hand-holding cameras, without introducing camera shake. Other lenses do not have vibration reduction, which means you need to use the reciprocal rule instead to determine how long your shutter speed should be without introducing blur from camera shake. It is also important that you know how to hold a camera.

Can You Take Long Exposure Shots With An iPhone

Your iPhone camera is not equipped for long exposure shots, because there is no way to set the shutter speed in the native Camera app. Fortunately, there are alternative ways to achieve those gorgeous light trails with your iPhone: either using a long exposure app or by converting Live Photos to long exposure shots. While the technique is totally different, youll find the effects very similar to what you would get using a DSLR.

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Capture Photos In The Pro Mode

• Show Highlight Clipping overlay on the over-exposed areas

A. Exit Capture interface ;B. On-camera flash options;C. Crop ratio options;D. Capture Timer options;E. Viewfinder overlay options;F. Presets;G. Exposure Lock;H. Capture button;I. Capture mode switch ;J. Switch to front camera;K. DNG/JPEG capture option;L. Toggle options;M. Capture settings;N. Show Highlight Clipping;O. Set ISO;P. Set Shutter Speed;Q. Set Exposure Compensation;R. Set White Balance;S. Set focus distance;T. Reset all settings in Pro mode;

How To Change The Shutter Speed Of Your iPhone

Your iPhones built-in Camera app does not come with a shutter speed option. This means that you have to use third-party apps in order to adjust your shutter speed. There are a lot of apps that you can download in order to control the shutter speed of your iPhones camera.;

One of the most excellent apps which you can use to adjust the shutter speed of your iPhone is the Camera+2. You can download it from the App Store for around $2.99. The apps offer a good choice of shutter speed options ranging from very fast to very slow. It even comes with a Slow Shutter shooting mode which allows you to capture long exposure photos.;

To change the shutter speed on the iPhone using Camera+ 2;

Note:

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How To Manually Control Your iPhone Camera

Harry Guinness is a photography expert and writer with nearly a decade of experience. His work has been published in newspapers like The New York Times and on a variety of other websites, from Lifehacker to Popular Science and Medium’s OneZero. Read more…

One point we often return to at How-To Geek is that;to take better pictures, you need to understand how to manually control your cameraeven if you dont do it for every setting or shot. Your iPhone is no exception. Unfortunately, iOS doesnt offer manual controls in the default Camera app so well need to go with a third-party app.

Apple has continued to innovate and add software features to the Camera appthings like Smart HDR and Portrait Mode. These are great, but they dont replace manual controls. For example, if you want to take photos out the window of a moving vehicle you need to set your shutter speed manually; your iPhones camera will almost always set it too slow to avoid motion blur. Similarly, youll probably want to manually control your camera at least some of the time when youre shooting at night or when theres a lot of contrast.

Even if you mainly let your iPhone do its thinglike me, to be honestits still important to know how to control things manually to capture great pictures when you need to.

The Free Option: Vsco

Okay, so even though Im recommending VSCO, Im not actually recommending it unless you only need to use manual controls occasionally and dont want to pay for that. Its just that its the best free option available.

VSCO is an incredible editing appits one of my favorite photography appsbut, the problem is, the camera part is merely okay. It gives you manual controls over shutter speed, ISO, white balance, focus, and exposure compensation but theyre not super intuitive to use. Also, when you open the app, you arent taken straight to the camera which means its a bit slow.

If you occasionally want to take a shot where you need to control the camera settings manually, VSCO will work great for you. However, if you regularly want to take control of your iPhones camera, then its likely to annoy you.

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