At Home with Tech

If you snap a vacation photo when your subjects’ eyes are unfortunately blinking, it isn’t necessarily a useless picture. iPhone’s ‘Live Photo’ trick can fix the problem.

The iPhone’s Live Photo feature can unnecessarily waste your phone’s onboard storage. But there are certainly situations when you should turn on the Live Photo mode when taking your pictures.

In fact, vacation time is a prime time to use it.

Don’t Miss the Moment
The iPhone’s ‘Live Photo’ is effectively a mini movie of a moment in time. It isn’t actually a moment at all. It’s 3 seconds!

Having 3 seconds to work with (1.5 seconds before and after you take the photo) allows you to later pick a better frame from that perfect instant you’re trying to capture. This can be especially useful in a group shot if someone’s eyes were unfortunately closed mid-blink.

Choosing a better frame (key photo) from a second before or after can make all the difference.

How to  easily do all this:

1. Select your photo in your iPhone’s Photos app.
2. Go into the edit mode and select ‘Live.’
3. Choose your best frame. (It feels like magic!)

Create a Long Exposure out of a Live Photo
Those 3 seconds from a live photo can also be useful in creating a ‘long exposure’ photo.

If you have a landscape photo you shot that contains moving water, the long exposure blurs together the motion of the water, creating a cool, silky effect. (Just be careful to keep your iPhone steady when taking the photo.)

After you’ve got your Live Photo of your beautiful landscape moment, just go back to it and choose “Long Exposure” in the “Live” drop-down on the top left of the screen.

Voilà!

Here’s an example of my iPhone 15 Pro Max’s Live Photo Long Exposure mode.
This is a shot of a tiny island near Calf Pasture Beach in my town. (And yes, it’s named… Calf Pasture Island.) The water looks so dreamy, right? That’s the Long Exposure mode!

Better Photography
Can today’s iPhone make you a better photographer? Not necessarily. But will its variety of software-based features often get you better pictures?

Absolutely.