The iPhone’s camera is great, and Apple has a lot of options in the Camera app to enhance your photos, but here are a few tricks that you can use to take even better and more creative photos.

Panodash

You’ve probably seen photos where a person appears more than once in the same shot. Professionals do that by stitching multiple images using photo editing software, but you can do that just with your iPhone’s default camera app.

Activate the panorama mode in the Camera app, and have a friend shoot the panorama from where you’re standing. The key to achieving this effect is for you to move quicker than the iPhone in the opposite direction of motion, as shown in the GIF below:

Driving Panorama

The Panorama mode is generally used to capture the surroundings in a circular fashion, centered around you, but another creative way to use this mode is to just enable it while you’re driving. Ensure that you’re holding the iPhone firmly, maintaining a steady position relative to the car, and ask a friend to drive it through an interesting neighbourhood to capture drive-by panoramas.

Zoom

The iPhone doesn’t have optical zoom. You can digitally zoom in by pinching in the Camera app, but the photo quality from this mode isn’t good. If you want to click zoomed-in photos of an object at a large distance, you can use a binocular as a zoom lens. Just place one of the sides of the binocular on the iPhone’s camera lens at the back, and you should be able to click zoomed-in photos without compromising on quality.

Macro Lens

The iPhone, as well as other cameras, can only focus up to a certain minimum distance, and if you go even closer to the subject, the photo will be blurred. Professional photographers use a Macro lens to reduce this minimum distance, and let them click photos of tiny subjects like insects. But you can click similar photos from your iPhone without spending a lot of money on expensive macro lenses.

Just place a small drop of water on your iPhone’s lens, and you’ll now be able to go extremely close to small subjects like insects, and click photos that you wouldn’t have been able to earlier.

DIY Tripod

You don’t need to buy an expensive tripod for your iPhone when you can make one yourself with a piece of cardboard and scissors. This DIY tripod, coupled with EarPods that let you click photos with the “+” button, let you create a perfect setup where you can pose at a distance from your iPhone and still be able to click photos. For details on how to make the cardboard tripod, check the video embedded below.

Underwater photos

Taking underwater photos with your iPhone sounds very risky, but with this little trick, you can capture partial underwater photos. Just take a glass, and insert your iPhone upside down in it. Now immerse this glass in water partially, such that the water level is safely below the rim, and you’ll now be able to take photos that are partially underwater.

Here’s the video demoing these tricks:

We’d love to see the photos you’ve shot using these tricks in the comments below, so feel free to share them.