iPhone Photography Journal
In this blog I don’t want to talk about the best iPhone photography settings. Those have been covered to death. To be honest, shooting raw on iPhone is amazing. The iPhone 17 Pro is probably the best iPhone to come out that pumps out raw files that I actually really enjoy editing. But honestly, I just don't give a shit about shooting raw on my iPhone anymore. Here's why.
So Why Don't I Care About Raw?
It all comes down to experience. Cameras like my Fuji X-T5, my Sony A7c2, or even my Ricoh GR3 are really enjoyable for photography because of the handling, the feeling, the viewfinder, or just the vibe. They get me into the zone of photography.
The iPhone is this amazing tool that connects us to everything and even sometimes snatches our attention away but let's not talk about the attention stuff. It's with us every single day. It's in our pockets. We carry it around like an extra limb. Cyborgs, almost. But for photography it lacks that experience feel. It's quite soulless. What it loses in soul, it makes up for by capturing everyday moments really well and really easily. You know, everything from just photos of family and friends, taking photos of food you've eaten when you're travelling or just random shit that's in your life.
But even though it lacks that experience factor, I've kind of changed my mindset on it. That all came when I upgraded to the iPhone 17 Pro. It shipped with Photographic Styles.
The Quiet Style
This is the equivalent of baking in filters or looks or something akin to Fuji film simulations. It's actually more like somewhere in between a raw file and straight to JPEG. It doesn't give you the super flexibility of a raw file but it still gives you just enough flexibility to change the look.
A cool way I use this is I tweaked the Quiet photographic style, which has this vintage vibe, like an old-timey journal entry. Something out of Indiana Jones's personal journal. That 1940s brown leather kind of thing.
My Quiet tweak on the 17 Pro: Tone -60, Colour 02, Palette 16. Dragged the pad down and left, warmth pulled toward the top right.
This is the iOS photographic style that I just leave on default. I've actually found it really cool to use this with the mindset of photo journals.
When I'm out and about, whether it's travelling around the world or just at home in my local areas, my phone's with me all the time. Having that photographic style set by default changes how I approach taking photos on my phone. I use it as something akin to the old Instagram, or back when phones first got cameras. We'd just take photos of the mundane things happening in our lives. I use it as a literal photo journal.
The Bit Nobody Talks About
Now what makes this really cool is the fact that iOS has amazing metadata. It's got time, date, where you took it, and just so much data that it's actually fantastic. When you couple that with iOS's photo search in the more modern iOS versions, you can use all the machine learning to find all these files and go back to memories and locations you've been to, to jog those mundane in-between moments. Cameras like the Fuji or the Sony don't carry all that data. They're great for focused photography, but they miss the information that makes the iPhone great as a visual journal.
When I was in Japan earlier this year, I used this photo journal mindset with this photographic style and it was actually really awesome. I caught photos of ramen, coffee, random streets I was in, or just really ordinary moments that I saw when I was out and about. It's been really cool going back to those because it's not those hyper curated, focused photos from my other camera but rather those in-between moments, which kind of is the essence of why I love photography. Like I said at the top, it loses that experience factor but it makes up for it in that casual capturing of everyday stuff. You know what? I'm just really enjoying treating the iPhone like this.
Those photos might not mean much to you. But they mean something to me and trust me the 100s of photos of Ramen filling up my iCloud storage mean a lot to me.
