The Halls – Documentary Family Photography with an iPhone

The iPhone Challenge

Despite having a fantastic range of professional DSLR cameras at my disposal I have found my most used camera outside of work has always been my iPhone. It is constantly on me, can slip into my pocket and allows me to capture moments on the fly without being restricted by its size and weight. I can edit and share the images almost instantly which I love when I’m traveling (it means I can leave the laptop at home) and I get to enjoy the experience rather than worry about protecting expensive equipment. With each version of the iPhone I am blown away by the image quality, that along with its size and portability makes it in my opinion the best day to day camera out there.

I have been curious as to how my iPhone 6 would stand up against my DSLR in a professional environment, would it be up to the challenge of shooting a ‘Day in the Life’ family documentary session, a mixture of different lighting scenarios along with fast moving kids will put any camera through its paces so I was interested to see how it would perform.  The challenge excited me and when Hannah (a fantastic photographer herself) said her family would be up for it, I jumped at the opportunity.

The whole experience was pretty liberating, no lens choices to make and minimum settings to adjust. I could only control the overall exposure  by dragging my finger up or down on the screen with no idea as to what settings were being changed (shutter, ISO etc). This meant all my focus could be on the composition and capturing the ‘moment’.

The best part of using my phone was that it allowed me to interact with the family so much more, it’s size meant it didn’t get in the way of allowing me to get involved and just ‘be there’. An iPhone being less intimidating and also more familiar than a DSLR also allowed me to capture moments that perhaps I would have missed with my bigger camera.

I certainly won’t be swapping my DSLRs for iPhones any day soon but it was a great challenge and although in certain scenarios the iPhone really struggled, especially in low light and battery life, I was happy with what I was able to capture of the fun filled day with the Halls.

Here is a little of what I saw: