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Here are a couple of very easy techniques that will boost your iPhoneography immediately. When Yanik asked me to write a few tips for you, his readers, I scratched my head, wondering what information would be of value, what tips would be truly useful and yet not readily available on tons of other iPhoneography blogs.

I came up with a few such tips and, indeed, these are not known by most iPhoneographers.

So here are some of my most secret tips and tricks!

Improve your low light shots with the native HDR function

The iPhone is often presented as a lousy low-light camera. But you can get nice photos at night, especially when your subject is still.

The photos below have been taken with an iPhone 4 and 4S, handheld. They’ve been edited a bit, in particular to darken the sky. But this does not change the fact that they were good night shots from the get go.

All you need to do to get such good results is use the native camera and activate the HDR function. If you want to compare with what you would get without HDR, enable “Keep Normal Photo” in the General Settings app / Photos & Camera.

You should notice a significant difference between the two shots in low light conditions.

Now whenever you hear an iPhoneographer ranting about the iPhone’s troubles in low light, you have a great tip to share!

Use the panorama function as a wide angle lens.

Sometimes, I wish I had more space behind myself so that I could move backward and capture more of the scene. But often times, I can’t.

A quick solution to that is to use the panorama function available in iOS6 for the iPhone 4S and 5 (sorry but owners of earlier iPhone versions are out of luck on this one).

You’ll be able to get a much wider field of view – similar to what a wide angle lens would provide. To make it effective, do not go too far towards the end of the panorama band, otherwise you’ll get a strip photo, i.e. a standard panorama photo that’s hard to apprehend with just one glance.

Have a look at the photos below to get a better sense of what I mean. I took both from the same place.

 Regular iPhone Photo

Photo with panorama feature used as a wide angle lens.

 Too blue to be true? Too yellow, too mellow? Use white balance lock!

Have you ever gotten an iPhone photo that has a blue tint or a yellow tint that feel awkward? That happens because of the white balance of the iPhone camera was off.

If our eyes are very good at judging what is white under different light sources, our iPhone often has great difficulty with doing so automatically.

To make things simple, here’s what I remember: indoor lights tend to be warm (yellow/orange) and outdoor lights tend to be cool (blue). I like to put it that way because it’s easy to memorize (warm inside, cool outside).

So here’s what happens: when you point at a yellow indoor light, the iPhone’s automatic white balance will compensate and add blue to your photo. And when you point at a cooler light outside, the iPhone will add yellow to compensate. The iPhone camera does so to reach the “perfect” white. The one our eyes see. But it often fails.

What can you do? It’s very simple.

In most situations when the iPhone fails, it’s because the scene has a mix of both warm/indoor and cool/outdoor lights.

If you feel your photo is too blue, aim at the outdoor light source. Then lock the iPhone focus on that source (hold your finger on the screen, on the outdoor light source). The native camera will add yellow. Then point back at your subject. Now you should have a much warmer photo.

If you feel your photo is too yellow, aim at the indoor source (it should be a yellow light source). Then lock the iPhone focus on that source (hold your finger on the screen, on the indoor light source). The native camera will add blue. Then point back at your subject. Now should have a much cooler photo.

There’s one drawback with using the native camera for this: when you lock the focus, it also locks the exposure together with the white balance (it locks these 3 things altogether – focus, exposure, white balance).

If you need to set the white balance separately from the exposure, use apps such as KingCamera or ProCamera.

Use a photomontage app to tell your story

Photo montages are fantastic. They bring your photos to life as they give a fuller account of the moment than a single shot. This is particularly true with photo series.

If you like taking photo series of the same moment, try using apps such as Diptych or Montager to create amazing images.

Show off your Instagram photos on your Facebook profile!

It would have been a sin to provide no iPhoneography tip related to Instagram. So here we go.

If you want your Facebook friends to see a nice montage of your Instagram photos when they visit your Facebook profile, you can use Statigram’s “profile cover” function to create a gorgeous montage of your Instagram shots in just one click.

1. Go to this page: http://statigr.am/promote.php.

3. Register or login with Statigram, using your Instagram credentials.

2. Scroll down a bit until you get to “Profile Cover”.

3. Hit “Create your Cover”. Statigram may take a couple of minutes to make it.

4. Right click and save on your hard drive

5. Upload on Facebook as a your profile cover.

That’s it!

A little bit about Guy Yang

A passionate photographer, Guy Yang set up The Beginners’ Lens in 2010. With his passion for the upcoming craft of mobile photography and his knack for teaching, he was keen to find ways to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with a larger community. He has always had the desire to help other casual photographers climb the photography learning curve, at their own speed, whatever the starting point.

Guy has been an avid iPhoneographer for the past 5 years and has been teching iPhoneography since 2011.

iPhone Camera Essentials is Guy’s comprehensive online video course entirely dedicated to iPhoneography. He shares all the tips and tricks he’s discovered over the 5 years he’s been perfecting the craft.

You see this motif everywhere, from fashion and interior design magazines to retail settings. At once, the large photo/minimalist room evokes drama, and sometimes mystery or suspense. Done well, it creates a mood that only a few interior designers can match by other means and modernists, bohemians, and creatives everywhere enjoy.

Who can say why, exactly? There is something so appealing between the contrast of a minimalism of a wall and the expressive punch of an artist’s photo print.

Yet, in this digital age, printing “large” doesn’t get a lot of discussion.

Printing extra-large prints isn’t something that a lot of people choose to do, and for good reason. It can be expensive and, as professional photographer Bill Wadman says, “It sounds obvious, but everything about your picture becomes magnified the bigger you print, the good as well as the bad.”

Wadman says that photographers who dare to scale their prints “up, up, and away” need to be grounded and focus on three things to avoid ruining a large print: “Technique, technique, and technique.”

Wadman hosts the popular photography podcast “On Taking Pictures,” along with co-host Jeffrey Saddoris of the photography blog Faded+Blurred. The show’s primary focus is discussing digital photography technique. As any artist will tell you, there is constant opportunity to practice, explore, and improve your craft.

Says Wadman, “If you plan to make large prints, you’ve got to be more vigilant about the details.” Specifically:

• “Make sure your focus is accurate, and that you’ve stopped down the aperture enough to increase your depth of field” to ensure that you have everything you want in focus.
• “Increase shutter speed if you can, in order to reduce camera shake,” he says, adding, “The 1 over the focal length rule is a very bare minimum here.”
• “With modern DSLR cameras, don’t be scared to use 800 or 1,600 ISO if it means better shutter speed or aperture,” he says, adding, “Noise can be improved later, blur can’t.”

Less experienced photographers may wrongly assume that fundamental problems can be “fixed in post,” so to speak, using Photoshop or other digital imaging software. Yet, all photo adjustments are rendered more visible — and unintentionally noticeable — at a large scale. The manipulation you can get away with at Web resolution of 72 dpi is very different than something large enough for someone to closely inspect in real life.

Wadman suggests that, like the “10,000-hour rule” popularly espoused by Malcolm Gladwell, it takes repeated practice to shoot and select photos that will work well in a large format. “Taking technically proficient images that are good enough to be blown up is a methodical process, so take your time,” he advises.

If you’re determined to get started with large-scale prints, be sure to use a sturdy tripod. Also recommended are mirror lock-up and a self-timer — if you’re particularly anxious about potential disruption or image corruption.

“Sent the lab the largest file your camera puts out,” advises Wadman, “but don’t up-res to a bigger file. The software at the lab will do that better than you can, and in a way that’s matched to the printer for best results.”

In addition, he says, “Feel free to send the lab a .jpg file. Just make sure that the quality setting is high when you save it.” Wadman recommends the “8 out of 10″ or more setting. Do not convert the image to another file, like .pdf, as it may need to be reverted back by the printer. Opt for the native file output from your camera, whether it’s .jpg or “raw”.

“I’ve learned that some images look great large, but others don’t. Each photograph has its own natural size. Bigger isn’t always better,” says Wadman. 

Katie McCaskey is a business owner, author, marketing consultant, and freelance journalist who writes for Vistaprint, a leading provider of personalized calendars, mugs, t-shirts, and a huge range of customized gifts for any occasions.

*** This is a sponsored post ***

Finally after months of hard work, I’m happy to let you know that Yanik’s Photo School has its official iPhone and Android App! Woohoo!

I’m very excited be able to bring you all of my tutorials to the mobile world in a sleek and simple style that keeps the focus on what you really want: LEARNING AWESOME STUFF!!

I’ve even added push notifications so you’ll know right away when a new tutorial is available.

As a bonus, I integrated a voice memo feature perfect for taking on location or scouting notes! How cool is that!

OK, ok…. here’s the Official Page of the app with more juicy details.

Or you can go get it right now!

I’ll be giving my second LIVE 1 hour webinar with the Topaz Labs gang on August 30th, 2012!

The Details

When: Thursday August 30th at 5:00pm EST

Theme: Enhance Your Mobile Photography with Topaz!

Webinar Description:  The quality of cell phone cameras have come a long way and many photographers are enjoying the convenience and spontaneous nature of mobile photography.  However, there are still some common problems with the quality of cell phone images, especially noise caused by shooting in low light.  Join pro photographer Yanik Chauvin as he demonstrates how to eliminate noise with Topaz DeNooise, as well as make mobile photography pop with Topaz Adjust, photoFXlab and more!

It’s with great pleasure and honor that UDEMY has asked me to publish Yanik’s Photo School’s Photoshop and Lightroom video tutorials on its platform.

For those of you not familiar with UDEMY, it’s one of the leading online learning sites on the Web featuring lectures from New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, celebrities, and Ivy League professors. And they’ve only been online just over a year! WOW!

So I worked hard to sort all of my tutorials and put them in 5 chapters:

1. PHOTOSHOP: PHOTO RETOUCHING
2. PHOTOSHOP: TECHNIQUES
3. LIGHTROOM: PHOTO RETOUCHING
4. LIGHTROOM: TECHNIQUES
5. BONUS PHOTOGRAPHY LESSONS

There are over 55 lessons for you to go through. And, in the tradition of the blog, the complete course is FREE! I thought you guys would like that!

So, go ahead and sign up! And if you have the time, I would appreciate a rating as well.

Enjoy!