It’s pretty overwhelming taking photos during a fashion show. There’s a million things going on, shutters going off, someone to your right is being entitled and blocking your view (or worse, your camera’s view), and you’re just trying to look pretty and get that perfect photo or video. After years spent in nearly every row at the shows, we’ve compiled five tips to make sure you get that perfect photo every time, no matter where you’re sitting next week and New York Fashion Week.
1. Find a spot and stick with it.
This tip has been recommend time and time again by fashion photographers both on the runway and on the streets. While this tip is a quick and easy one to master, all the new functionality built right into the latest iOS software on your iPhone 6 and 6 Plus makes it nearly dummy proof to come out with a great shot in a short amount of time.
First things first, you no longer need to tap your screen to find the focal point, unless you want to play around with the exposure. A great tip when you find that sweet spot on the runway, is to set and lock the exposure in that position, so you can take photos on burst mode by holding the photo button as the model enters your frame. Not only will you have many more photos to select from, your iPhone will actually identify the best ones within the set with a small dot, and show the burst as one photo (instead of 20 blurring ones) within your photo album.
2. Edit within your Photos App.
You’re probably pretty used to doing things a certain way on your iPhone, and we were too, but once we actually went into the new Photos app on our iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and started playing around, we were pretty amazed that there’s really no longer any reason to leave the Photos app to use your other photo editing app. When editing all you need to do is click on the circle with the three dots to access all your other photo editing apps within your Photos app.
It makes it way easier to flip between functions within each app and also filters out all those pesky ads that pop on when you’re using a free app.Not to worry if you’re not as app crazy as we are, iOS 8 has expanded their smart editing tools in the Photos app to quickly make smart adjustments to the light, colour, and focus of a photo, plus add a cool filter (that’s right, filters are becoming cool again!). You can also blur out any noise in the background of a photo, which is particularly useful on the runway if you’re in a less than desirable seat and want to focus the attention of a photo onto the model and less on those peacocks in the front row.
3. Use the timer mode when taking Ussies.
There’s nothing worse than a blurry Ussies (let’s make this a thing) taken of you and your seat mates. Using the timer mode in iOS 8 is a great way to make sure everyone is done quaffing when the photo finally snaps.You can set the timer for three or ten seconds to take a series of photos in burst mode. That was you’ll have a few gems to choose from. Say goodbye to blurry ussies forever.
4. Take photos while recording video.
Our minds practically exploded when we found out that you can take a photo while you’re recording video. By tapping the white circle on the left of the record button you can grab yourself a great photo and still capture the video with a steady hand. This is particularly useful when a model is walking past you on the runway, so once you’ve found your spot (like we taught you in earlier), begin recording video and wait for that perfect moment to snap your still. Screenshots are so last year.
You can also record video in landscape format if you’re at the end of the runway by adjusting the camera settings to record at 60FPS and capture a 1080 HD video.
5. Edit your videos.
Did you know you can use iMovie on your iPhone now? It’s pretty amazing what you can do with your finger tips and if Burberry’s spring summer 2014 runway presentation doesn’t sell you (even though they’re using the iPhone 5), we’ll convince you right now.
It comes loaded onto every iPhone 6 Plus and is available for download on iPhone 6, and is pretty user-friendly considering how technical it is. You can splice and rearrange a video file, slow it down, speed it up, make it split screen, apply filters, add text, music, and so much more. To top it off you can upload your video directly to Instagram, Vine, or Vimeo or any other platform you like.