Photographing a Vacation with an I-Phone

I'm back from my European vacation and as promised,

I tried using my I-Phone to take selfies and scenic photos.

Let's start with the selfie stick...we could not figure out how

to NOT have the selfie stick in the selfie!

Seriously!  I AM a photographer, but there was that dang selfie stick in 

most of the photos!

UNTIL......

I figured out I needed to tilt the phone BACK/UP when it was in

the selfie stick and that's the trick!  DUH!

Many people had and used selfie sticks in Europe and we were very happy

to have one to get all four of us into the photos.

It was also fun to see what we were shooting so we could include 

various landmarks.

Using my I-Phone 5s to take photos was so much easier than

hauling around my cumbersome DSLR camera!  

For most of the tours, I had only my phone.

I especially love the wide angle of the lens!

I had to do a panorama and stitch three photos together to get this same

shot with my DSLR, but the phone captured the entire height of the Eiffel Tower.

Yet it's not as clear as my DSLR shot shown here:

I edited right on my phone using the editing apps I mentioned in this blog post

to add contrast and color.

I was very pleased with what I was able to capture including

not blowing out the pretty skies.

Look at these wonderful wide angles maintaining clarity and color 

In Nice, France.

I thought it was very strange that the beach along the French Riviera is not sand...

it's ROCKY!  I don't know how people walked and laid out on those rocks! 

I enjoyed using the phone camera on our trip to Normandy.

SO liberating to not have to worry about lenses, settings or exposure.

I got to point and shoot and like the photos!

The one frustration...no ability to control Depth-of-Field and isolate subjects.

I have read about add-on lenses for the phone and want to try them out!

The phone camera also works well on close-ups and macro!

It also handled different light conditions.

Inside the church where Princess Grace was married in Monaco.

Inside a perfume factory in Eze, France.

With my editing apps, I was able to quickly crop this photo in

front of Buckingham Palace in London,

raise saturation on the Mediterranean Sea in Monaco,

Lighten or darken the photo of hubby and me staying at a French villa,

and boost and lower exposure on specific areas of my photos.

I edited while riding buses, trains, and sitting in taxis.

Each day, I created a collage of our adventures to post on Facebook

using an app called LiveCollage.   It was very quick and easy

to use with lots of photo collage layouts to choose from.

I think collages work best with a combination of wide shots,

close-ups, people photos and scenery.

We had finally figured out the selfie stick!

I'm excited to use my phone camera more in the future

now that I understand how to use it!