IPHONEOGRAPHY

Here is an HDR image of our camera during a time-lapse shot for our Beam Brush video. You will notice that there is great coloring in the sky, camera, plants, and ground due to this being an HDR image.

At Mando, we love our iPhones. We use them for just about everything from responding to your e-mails to reading the latest Apple news to even posting to this blog. Apple did an amazing job designing every aspect of these phones – including the camera. With the iPhone 4′s 5-megapixel iSight camera and the iPhone 4S’s 8-megapixel iSight camera, many users are taking their iPhone pictures to the next level: iPhoneography. Users like Justin Balog have written entire books on how to make the most of your iPhone camera. Our friends at iDownloadBlog.com have even contacted Justin to host a iPhone Phot0graphy series on the site. We encourage you to check it out.

Today, we would like to cover a photography method called HDR. No, it doesn’t stand for high-def retina. HDR is simply High Dynamic Range. This means that an image has a greater range between the darker and lighter values than a standard pictures.

As an example, we took some pictures to show you how it works. To produce an HDR image, a camera will take three pictures of three different exposures. Then it combines these pictures into one. Below you will see an example of three pictures of different exposures and then the HDR image below. This was taken with our Canon t3i and then converted to HDR in Photoshop CS6.

The iPhone also has this technology natively. If you open your camera app and then tap on options, you will notice a slider that says HDR. Switch that to on and you are ready to go. Make sure to hold your phone still so that it will be able to accurately line up the pictures. While this is a great feature that Apple has included, there are also several third-party apps that do an even better job. We are a huge fan of Pro HDR. Check out some pictures below that we took using this app: