How to Take Honest, High-Quality Photos with Your iPhone

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Brooklyn-based portrait photographer Aundre Larrow seeks to convey truth in his images—be it in a personal project capturing New Yorkers on the G train, or a commissioned campaign on the die-hard fans of the Golden State Warriors.

“Photography is painting with light,” Larrow said during a workshop on honest photography at the recent Adobe 99U conference in New York, where he was finishing up his time as an Adobe Creative Resident. “It’s not that it’s the original visual medium—obviously, there’s drawing and painting—but now, mostly thanks to our phones, it’s the most pervasive.” And because it’s become so easy to take photographs today, “we now have a responsibility to create responsibly,” he added.

With a degree in journalism, Larrow has developed expertise in portrait photography through shooting people since he was 15 years old, from college basketball games to editorial work, and collaborations with brands like American Express and events like New York Fashion Week. Larrow emphasized the need to take honest photography—pictures that don’t rely on editing or retouching and portray people as they really are. After attending Larrow’s workshop at 99U, we caught up with the photographer to learn more about how to take thoughtful, beautiful images with an iPhone. Here, we share his top tips.

It all starts with light.

“The first and primary thing you have to focus on is light,” Larrow said. And the first question you should ask yourself is: “Where is the light coming from?” Once you’ve located the light source, be it the sun or an overhead lamp, situate your subject in as even light as possible.

“If you’re taking photos of someone in the middle of the day, the sun’s gonna be really strong and there will be sharp shadows,” he explained. In this scenario, he said, look for an area where the light is the same—even if that means positioning your subject in a shadow. “It seems silly, but wherever the light is even and flat, that’s where you want to be. Your whole goal as a photographer is to make an environment that best lets you illuminate the story you’re trying to tell.” Additionally, be sure not to overwhelm your subject with light by backlighting them (i.e. situating them in front of a light source).

Lock your exposure.

It’s important to take the best image you can while you’re shooting, rather than relying on editing tools and filters later on. Larrow doesn’t advise using the iPhone’s HDR (high dynamic range) setting or flash unless you absolutely need to (see below), but he does recommend locking the exposure on your iPhone camera to maintain better control of the light while you’re shooting.

Here’s how to lock the exposure: Before you take a photo in the iPhone camera app, press and hold the part of the screen where you’d like the focus of the image to be. A small square will pop up, and a lock icon will appear. Then, you can scroll up or down to adjust the exposure, making the image brighter or darker. Wherever the exposure is locked, that part of the photograph is going to be exposed most accurately.

This helps with portraits, particularly when you’re trying to capture skin tones correctly, but it also applies while shooting objects and landscapes. If you’re taking a picture of a sunset over a city skyline, for example, you should lock the exposure on the sky or the center of the sunset. This may darken the buildings in the photo, but you can scroll up on the screen to brighten the image slightly and get some of the details back.

It’s always better to get the exposure correct when taking the picture, rather than fixing it with editing, Larrow said. “But if for some reason you [cannot get the lighting right and] have to edit it later, whatever application you use, it’s always better to take a photo that’s too dark than one that’s too bright,” he explained. “Once it’s too bright, you can’t get the details back in it.”

Say you’re taking photos of landscapes on vacation, and the lighting isn’t ideal. Larrow said in this case, it’s best to use the exposure to take one photo that’s a little too dark, one that’s a little too bright, and one in the middle. “From there, you can kind of get a sense of what the best version of that image is,” he said. If it’s the middle of the day and it’s very bright, this is one case where you may want to use HDR, which is intended to capture greater detail.

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