Travel Photography - iPhone Photography for Mindfulness

Taking Vibrant Indoor Photos with Your iPhone

Taking pictures indoors with an iPhone or any mobile phone under artificial lights often produces poor images. How often do you like the pictures you take at home, in restaurants, or on the streets at night?

This is because these lights aren’t designed for photography. The images will have lots of digital noise and won’t print well. However, if some natural light comes in, especially from one side, you will see better results.

Last Saturday, we talked about architectural photography with an iPhone. I explained how important it is to keep lines in pictures straight to represent a place correctly. The same goes for taking pictures of indoor spaces. The lines of the rooms should ideally be perpendicular and parallel to the edges of the frame, just as we see them in real life.

Bharatpur City Palace clicked with an iPhone 14

I took these pictures at the City Palace in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, using the Halide Pro Mark II app. This app has a digital spirit level that helps me keep my lines straight. Please read about my virtual mobile photography workshops to learn more about making the best use of your iPhone camera.

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A Man Napping at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in India

iPhone photography at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary

In a previous post, I showed you a photo of a lemonade seller catching a snooze at a street corner in Mumbai City. Staying with the topic of snoozing, here’s a man dozing off in the canteen area at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Rajasthan. He has spread out a cardboard sheet underneath him while basking in the winter sun.

Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary is a place where you typically visit with large telephoto lenses to click close-ups of birds. When you’re lugging around so much photography gear, it becomes difficult to carry additional cameras for moments like this. That’s where an iPhone comes in handy for snapping these in-between moments that add so much joy to the day.

But even if you are using your mobile phone to take photographs like this, it is important to set your focus point on your subject. Your mobile camera has a large depth of field; however, if your primary subject is even slightly out of focus, the image will not look sharp when you print it. To set the focus, simply tap on your subject after you have composed your photograph, and then take the picture.

I conduct online mobile photography workshops that help you develop your creative eye and enjoy photography.

Tourists Enjoying Their Own Photos at Fatehpur Sikri

Emperor Akbar the Great stood here in Fatehpur Sikri near Agra with his wife, Mariam, not long ago. Over 450 years have passed since they lived here which works out to a little over 1,64,000 days. I thought it would work out to be more than that. 1,64,000 days doesn’t seem like a long time ago, does it?

The people of the time aren’t around, but their art, architecture, and tales continue to live on. They probably didn’t have WiFi. Notes tied to pigeons were probably the most advanced way of getting messages across. Now we have telephonic devices with cameras that fit into our pockets, which most of us take for granted.

I watched these lads click each other inside this palace room and step outside to review their photos. I clicked this image with an iPhone 14 with the 0.5x lens. The Ultrawide 0.5x lens makes it that much more difficult to keep our lines straight in an image. I talk more about this in the section, “Apps for clicking RAW images with iPhones”. If your phone camera or app doesn’t allow you to click RAW photos with the Ultrawide lens, you can consider using the SKYVIK Pro 2 in 1 (Wide+Macro) lens.

My iPhone images are an artistic exploration where I look for slices of the real world that are almost otherworldly in their appearance or events. I talk more about my process in the section “Vision and Mission”. While these are photographs of the real world, I don’t look at them as editorial in nature, but in the space of fine art. And as a result I may have altered their editorial content in a manner that I have stated in the section “Editorial Disclaimer”.