taking great photos with your iPhone

iPhone camera

You probably didn't make your decision to buy an iPhone based solely on the quality of the iPhone's camera.

The iPhone camera is 2.0 megapixels with no zoom. It captures 1,200-by-1,600 pixel, 72 DPI, RGB photos.

To take a photo, you touch a camera icon on the middle of the home screen. When the camera opens you'll see a button to take a photo with and another one to see any photos that you’ve already taken.

Unlike nearly every camera ever made, the iPhone takes a picture when the "shutter button" is released, not pressed.

To take a photo:

1. Press and hold the shutter button
2. Compose your photo
3. Release the button

You can e-mail a photo, designate it as the phone’s wallpaper, attach it to a contact name so that it pops up when a call comes in, or send it to a web gallery.

Tips:

The iPhone camera does best in bright, evenly-lit scenes. High-contrast scenes (such as those that include bright skies and dimly-lit areas) result in washed-out highlights and featureless shadows. Decide what's most important to you, and compose your photograph to limit the light range of the scene to what it is capable of recording.

There’s no flash. So you can't take photos in low-light situations with your iPhone. Move your subject into the light, if possible. Bright light from the open sky, without direct sunlight, is best.

Keep the lens of your iPhone camera clean. Fingerprints or dirt on the lens will cloud your photos, especially if there is a bright light shining towards the lens (like the sun). You could easily carry a soft cloth made for cleaning glasses or camera lenses and give it a wipe before using it.

The Email Photo button compresses the image and strips the exif data, and resizes photos to 640x480. If you want to add a description and post your photo to Flickr, the text has to go BELOW the photo on the Email Photo page on the iphone.