Dorchester — Aug 13th 2019

Whilst we all snap away with our iPhones we not appreciate all the powerful features included. David Parnell took us step by step through these features limiting his talk to the mechanics and not getting into composition other than to show us a range of professional photos he taken exclusively on his iPhone. David started with the menu which you can scroll through at the bottom of the screen and how which you select changes the options in the menu at the top of the screen. Where applicable you can switch between the more powerful camera on the back of the phone or the one on the front typically used for selfies.
The bottom menu includes Time Lapse, Slo-Mo, Video, Photo, Square, Pano and on the more sophisticated iPhones with two rear cameras Portrait offering powerful editing of the relationship between the portrait and the background. In Photo mode David explained how to direct the camera on where to focus and vary the exposure and then ran through the various options on the top menu. These change when you select one to display its options including; selecting Flash the menu adjusted to allow different flash settings, Similarly selecting HDR displays the options. High Dynamic Range is achieved by the camera taking and pooling three photos at different exposures. David suggests that with modern phone with sufficient memory best to leave on as default. Live photos are when the photo is a short 3 second video with sound taken 1.5 seconds before you press the shutter. David explained that on this setting the camera is continuously taking photos caching 1.5 seconds. The final two options in the top menu are the timer and colour setting though this is also applicable in the Photos edit mode.
David ran through the other options on the lower menus pointing out that in both Video and Slo-Mo there are additional options in the Camera Settings Menu. Pano only works with the phone held in portrait mode and that tapping on the arrow change the direction of the pan.

After the break David Moon talked about splitting a Photos library. He started with the caveat that any serious photographer with a large library and high resolution images including camera raw would still be best with Adobe Lightroom but suggested that for most of us Photos is more than adequate. Splitting libraries was common with the earlier iPhoto App which tended to be quite sluggish but on modern Macs the Photos App is pretty fast. However if one wants to use iCloud Photo Library without paying for too much iCloud storage then splitting your library can make sense with only one linked to the Cloud. David showed how by holding down the option key when selecting the Photos App, you get the option to select a library or add a new one. Only one library can be treated as the System Library. To select a library as the system library open it and the in Preferences, if not already the system library you get the option to make it so.
You can copy photos from one library to another by exporting from the one to a folder and then importing from that folder to the other library. If you want to move from one library to another then you have to export and import before deleting the photos in the library from which they were exported. In preparing to talk about this subject, David had been surprised at how relatively small his Photos Library is at just over 12 Gb. Given that he pays the £0.79 per month have 50 Gb of capacity on iCloud he conclude that he might as well just have one library and opt in iCloud Photo Library and suspects that that is the best option for most members, particularly if they take all their photos on IOS devices. Georgia prefers not to have her Mac connected to iCloud Photo Library although her IOS devices are. She downloads all the photos from her iPhone to her Mac and then selects and files those she wishes to retain into clearly titled folders. This gives her the assurance of having her photos on the Mac filed as she wants them independent of the Cloud and can back up as required, a good disciplined approach.

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