Shot on iPhone 12 Pro Max by Nathan Underwood. Floral arrangements by Kiana Underwood.
Valentine’s Day is this Sunday and before the festive and flowery love holiday, Apple shared a detailed post on “How to capture stunning floral photos with iPhone 12 Pro models”. And the writing of a professional floral photographer has tips that can be useful for a variety of subjects in addition to flowers.
Apple shared the new feature on how to get the most out of your iPhone 12 Pro camera systems in a newsroom post today.
Nathan Underwood of Tulipina (@tulipinadesign), one of the leading floral design studios in the world, says that the advanced camera systems on the iPhone 12 Pro models have helped to brighten up your floral photography.
Features like Apple ProRAW, the new LiDAR scanner, enhanced portrait mode and more make it easier than ever to take stunning photos with iPhone.
In his own words, here’s Nathan’s approach to photographing floral arrangements from setup and framing to using Portrait, ProRAW and editing mode.
To set up
It all starts with lighting. Look for diffused natural light, preferably from the side. If indoors, this usually occurs by setting about 0.5 to 1 meter from a window. If you are outdoors, find a space with uniform light, avoiding hot spots and shadows. This often means looking for a place with a consistent hue.
The next component is the background, which is as simple as finding a neutral background (grays and blues work very well) with a minimal pattern. Avoid bricks, stripes, dots and other distracting patterns. The subject must really stand out, and this combination of lighting and background does the trick.
Framework
For still lifes, framing the photo is the key. Although you can crop later, getting a photo with the correct angle and perspective framing is critical to ensuring you have the best photo to work with. With the iPhone, I almost always choose the lens with the closest focal length. On the iPhone 12 Pro models, this is the telephoto camera.
When framing a floral arrangement, place the subject in the center and make sure that the frame is filled evenly. I tend to hold cameras in my hands, including the iPhone, and use a slight downward angle (just a few degrees) to the front of the subject. This ensures that you can see the vase, but also get great depth and dimensionality from the flowers, which are the stars.
The telephoto camera offers 2x optical zoom range on the iPhone 12 Pro and 2.5x on the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Portrait mode
For photos that go from the camera to editing and uploading, I love the Portrait mode, as seen in the photo below, which is available on all iPhone 12 models. The portrait mode captures an incredible sense of depth that can be manipulated during editing in the Photos app, allowing for an incredible variety of creativity. This is especially useful when photographing floral arrangements, due to its complexity and dimensionality. If you’re new to still life photography, Portrait mode is your best friend.
Editing in the Photos app
There are some edits that I apply to 99% of the images I take, all made in the Photos app. These are personal preferences; you must experiment to find your own signature style. For example, I like to focus on crop or proportion, exposure, saturation and heat. To find these tools in the Edit in Photos workflow, touch a photo to view it in full screen, then touch the dial icon at the bottom and swipe through the various options.
- Crop the photo as necessary so that the flowers occupy the entire frame, making them as “in your face” as possible.
- Small increases in exposure illuminate the picture and allow the arrangement to stand out, especially on a cell phone screen.
- For floral arrangements and other colorful still lifes, overcoming saturation a little (less than 10) further enhances colors and allows them to stand out.
- Finally, adjust the heat of the photo. This usually means cooling the image down only slightly for an elegant calming effect that is also very realistic.
While all of these edits are simple, they are very significant in producing a fantastic final image that is ready to be shared and enchanted with others.For more information on how to access and use each tool, visit “Edit photos and videos on iPhone. ”
Apple ProRAW
Something very exciting for me is the introduction of Apple ProRAW on the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, which provides the absolute maximum amount of image information for applying deeper edits. This means that you can now natively capture and export RAW images with the iPhone, allowing for new creative possibilities, and personally, I can now easily incorporate the iPhone photos into my normal professional post-production workflow along with my DSLR. Remember 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 usually make the same edits as I would in the Photos app – crop or aspect ratio, exposure, saturation and heat – but for floral still lifes, in particular, I like being able to highlight specific flowers using the Radial Filter Tool, which allows me to select one small area to make specific edits. As can be seen in the photo below, this may mean bringing up the exposure of a single flower that was inserted in the arrangement – a detail that can be seen with the naked eye, but it can be difficult for any camera to capture.
To start using Apple ProRAW on the iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 12 Pro Max, choose Settings> Camera> Formats and enable the feature.
For more examples of floral photography and arrangement inspiration, visit @tulipinadesign.
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