Taken with iPhone 12 Pro Max by Nathan Underwood. Flower arrangements by Kiana Underwood.
Valentine’s Day is this Sunday, and ahead of the flowery, festive love holiday, Apple has shared a detailed post on “How to Take Beautiful Flower Photos with iPhone 12 Pro Models.” And a professional flower photographer’s article contains tips that can be useful for a variety of subjects besides flowers as well.
Apple today shared in a Newsroom post the new feature to get the most out of its iPhone 12 Pro camera systems.
Nathan Underwood from Tulipina (@tulipinadesign), one of the world’s leading floral design studios, says the advanced camera systems on the iPhone 12 Pro models have contributed to a fuller bloom of its floral photography.
Features such as Apple ProRAW, the new LiDAR Scanner, Enhanced Portrait Mode, and more make it easier than ever to capture impressive photos with iPhone.
In his own words, here’s Nathan’s approach to photographing floral arrangements, from setting up and framing to using Portrait mode, ProRAW, and editing.
Setup
Everything starts with enlightenment. Look for diffused natural light, ideally from the side. If you are indoors, this is usually due to placing about 0.5 to 1 meter from a window. When outside, find an area with even light and avoid hot spots and shadows. This often means looking for a spot with constant shade.
The next part is the background, which is as easy as finding a neutral background (gray and blue work fine) with a minimal pattern. Avoid brick, stripes, dots, and other distracting patterns. The subject really needs to pop, and this combination of lighting and background does it.
Framing
In still lifes, framing the photo is key. While you can crop later, taking a correctly framed shot from the right angle and perspective is critical to ensure you have the best shot to work with. With the iPhone, I almost always choose the lens with the shortest focal length. On iPhone 12 Pro models, this is the telephoto camera.
When framing a flower arrangement, place the subject in the center and make sure the frame is evenly filled. I tend to handheld cameras, including the iPhone, and use a slight downward angle (just a few degrees) from the front to my subject. This ensures that you can see the vase well, but also gets a lot of depth and dimensionality from the flowers, those are the stars.
The telephoto camera offers 2x optical zoom range on iPhone 12 Pro and 2.5x on iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Fashion portrait
For photos going from camera to edit to upload, I love the portrait mode as shown in the photo below, which is available on all iPhone 12 models. Portrait mode captures an incredible sense of depth that can be manipulated when editing in the Photos app, allowing for an amazing array of creativity. This is especially useful when photographing flower arrangements, given their complexity and dimensionality. If you are new to still life photography, portrait mode is your best friend.
Edit in the Photos app
There are a few common edits that I apply to 99 percent of the images I take, all of which are done in the Photos app. These are personal preferences; you have to experiment to find your own signature style. For example, I like to focus on crop or aspect ratio, exposure, saturation and warmth. To find these tools in the Edit in Photos workflow, tap a photo to view it in full screen, then tap the dial icon at the bottom and swipe through all the different options.
- If necessary, crop the photo so that the flowers fill the entire frame, making them as “in your face” as possible.
- Small increases in exposure brighten the frame and make the arrangement stand out, especially on a mobile screen.
- For flower arrangements and other colorful still lifes, a small amount (less than 10) against the saturation further bumps the colors and makes them stand out.
- Finally, adjust the warmth of the photo. In general, this means that the image is cooled just a little bit for an elegant soothing effect that is also still very lifelike.
While all of these edits are simple, they make a lot of sense to produce a fantastic final image ready to share and surprise others.For more information on accessing and using each tool, please visit ‘Edit photos and videos on iPhone
Apple ProRAW
Something very exciting for me is the introduction of Apple ProRAW on iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, which provides the absolute maximum amount of image information to apply deeper edits. This means that you can now capture and export RAW images natively with the iPhone, opening up new creative possibilities, and personally I can now easily include iPhone photos in my normal professional post-production workflow in addition to my DSLR. Don’t forget to enable Apple ProRAW on your iPhone 12 Pro model to get started.
To get the most out of Apple ProRAW, I like to edit the image in Adobe Lightroom. In Lightroom, I generally do the same edits that I would in the Photos app – crop or aspect ratio, exposure, saturation, and warmth – but for flower still lifes in particular, I like having the ability to enhance certain flowers by using the Radial Filter tool , which allows me to select a small area to perform specific operations. As seen in the photo below, this could mean increasing the exposure of a single flower put into the arrangement – a detail that can be seen with the naked eye, but difficult for any camera to capture is.
To get started with Apple ProRAW on iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 12 Pro Max, choose Settings> Camera> Formats and turn it on.
For more examples of floral photography and inspiration for arrangements, visit @tulipinadesign
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