On a Friday in October 2014, Brendan Ó Sé stood at the top of a slope in a Copenhagen park called Superkilen and took five or six photographs. He posted one of them to Flickr on the 31st of October under a title he still cannot entirely account for: God will send a sign. When he does, be ready.
A month later an email arrived saying someone loved the picture. He assumed it was spam. A month after that, a second email, also ignored. The third made clear this was not something to ignore, so he replied, and back came a non-disclosure agreement with the word Cupertino on it. The photograph went out on billboards in twenty-six cities as part of Apple's Shot on iPhone campaign. He saw his own name in Time magazine on the Monday, and by the afternoon friends in Berlin and Los Angeles were sending him pictures of his work four storeys high.
He was named iPhone Photographer of the Year in 2017. In 2018 he spent sixteen weeks photographing hurling supporters on a commission that ended up on the walls of the Hunt Museum in Limerick, shot on a Fuji, a Nikon and an iPhone. The iPhone frames were the equals of the ones shot on the high-end cameras.
He is also, and this matters more for our purposes, a teacher. He runs mobile photography workshops with the Glucksman Gallery in Cork and the Photo Museum of Ireland in Dublin, and has run them in Apple stores from London to Singapore. He hears the same question in all of them. Why don't my photographs look like yours?
We reached out to him to hear his answer. Here it is, in ten parts.
1. Stop pinching to zoom
"I think your phone should come with a warning label on it," he told us. "Do not pinch to zoom, you will ruin your image."
Your phone has two entirely different kinds of zoom and it does not tell you when you cross between them. Tapping between the marked lenses, the 1x and the 2x and the 5x, moves you between real pieces of glass. Nothing is lost in quality. Pinching past those points does something else. The phone enlarges the pixels it already has and invents the rest, which is why the result looks soft and slightly plasticky, and why it falls apart the moment you print it at any size worth hanging.
Zoom with your feet is the old photography saying, and this is also true for shooting on mobile.
2. Turn on the grid
Settings, then Camera, then Grid. Two lines each way, creating nine squares, and with that your composition starts organising itself around them. It is the first thing he switches on, and it costs nothing.
3. Tap the screen before you take the picture
Most people know tapping does something. Fewer know it does two things at once. It sets the focus, and it sets the exposure.
In workshops Ó Sé demonstrates this by having people aim at a window, then at the wall beneath it, then at the sky, watching the picture brighten and darken as they go. Tapping the brightest important thing in the scene, rather than the darkest, is the single fastest improvement available to most people. What happens then is you get a better balanced exposure. An easy way to practise this is in your living room at night while watching TV. If you have the lights off while watching, point your phone at the TV. To begin with, tap everywhere other than the TV. Notice that the image from the TV is not clear. Then tap the TV and see the difference. "That simple thing about exposing for the highlights can dramatically improve someone's photographs."
4. Then dial the exposure down to minus 0.3
His most contrarian setting, and the one that most changes how a photograph looks on a wall rather than a screen.
"One of the failings in later iterations of iPhone and other smartphones is that the images are overly saturated and too bright," he says. "I usually have the exposure dialled down to a minus 0.3."
Open the camera, tap the chevron at the top of the screen to reveal the toolbar, find the exposure control marked with a plus and minus, and pull it back. Then go to Settings, Camera, Preserve Settings and switch on the exposure adjustment, or the phone will reset you to zero every time you close the app. A white shirt keeps its creases. A pale sky keeps its cloud. Skin stops looking waxy under a window.
5. Turn Live off, and stay away from the filters
"I think Live is quite gimmicky," he says, "unless you want to get creative with it." He uses it occasionally for zoom bursts converted into long exposures. For everything else it doubles your storage and softens your decisiveness.
The filters he simply does not touch. "You need to train your eye to see what you'd have with it." A filter makes the choice for you at the moment you are least equipped to judge it, and it is very hard to undo afterwards.
The native camera app, he insists, is excellent as it comes. If you eventually want more, he uses Pro Camera for one function in particular: it separates focus from exposure, so you can hold detail in a bright sky and keep a face sharp at the same time.
6. Shoot at a size you can print
Ó Sé currently shoots on an iPhone 15 and is waiting on the next one. He shoots JPEG, at the largest resolution the phone offers, which on recent models means 48 megapixels rather than the default 24. Look under Settings, Camera, Formats, where the exact wording varies by model.
The files are bigger. That is the trade. A photograph you might one day want at gallery size has to be captured at gallery size, and no amount of care afterwards can put back detail that was never recorded.
The other thing I would add here is that the one-hour photo places people bring their photos to very often have presets when printing which result in poor quality. Get a good printer. This is where you come in, I imagine, with your business model.
7. Press the volume button, not the screen
The top volume button can take the picture. This sounds trivial and is not. "I see some people and they're violently hitting the shutter," he says, "so you're getting that little shudder and kind of movement from it." The volume button lets you hold the phone in two hands, steady, the way you would hold a camera. He uses it all the time.
While you are in that menu, switch on Use Volume Up for Burst. Apple changed the old behaviour some years ago, so holding the on-screen shutter now records video, and burst requires a drag to the left. The volume button restores it as a reflex, which really matters when you are trying to get shots of a child in play.
8. Photograph the empty space first
The habit he uses on every professional job, and the one almost nobody uses at home. On a supermarket product launch the morning we spoke, his first frame contained no product and no people.
"I always take the photograph without the subject first," he says. The reason is a failure he watches happen in every workshop. "The photographer can be made blind, because you're just looking at your subject, and the periphery can be overlooked and lost."
Take one picture of the doorway, the garden, the corner of the room. Look at it the way you would look at someone else's photograph. You will see the wheelie bin, the road sign apparently growing out of someone's shoulder, the washing on the line. Then you will know where people should stand, and which way they should face so they are neither squinting nor reduced to a silhouette.
9. For family photos, start shooting before everyone is ready
The frame where everybody has finally stopped moving and is looking at the lens can very often be the worst picture of the sequence.
"The candid moments as they're getting set, as they're coming into the frame, as they're mixing with each other," he says. "Those ones very often are better than the final one, where you've everybody kind of frozen, staring at the camera."
So start early and keep going. Use burst for anything that moves, and children count as moving. If you want to be in the photograph yourself, he recommends a small tripod or gimbal with the timer, an Apple Watch as a remote, or one of the Bluetooth shutters that cost a couple of euro in any discount shop.
10. Move, and hold the thing straight
Two related points. The first is perspective, which he teaches before almost anything else. "Perspective is everything in photography." Photographs of children taken from adult height all look identical because they are all taken from the same place. Crouch. Get lower. Tell the story from the child's perspective. Find the higher angle if the room allows it.
The second is your grip. Hold your phone the way you hold it to read a message and it sits along the fingers, tilted back, resting on the little finger, which means it is not facing the scene at all. It is facing slightly upward, and every vertical line in the picture is quietly converging. "If you have the tilt, the perspective is going to be a little bit off, whereas if you're here, things are going to be more in proportion and balanced." He is honest that the effect is small on its own. What it does is start you thinking about where you are standing, which is not small at all.
While you are thinking about it, remember the phone turns sideways. "You'd be surprised. Some of them realise, oh, I didn't think I could shoot in landscape."
...And one thing to buy
A wrist strap, and he is unusually firm about it. "It's a muscle memory at the moment to have that strap around my wrist." One broke on him in Berlin and he barely shot for the rest of the trip. Another time, on a muddy riverbank, the phone left his hand entirely and the strap was the only thing between it and the water.
There is more in it than insurance, though. Putting a strap on a phone is the small ceremony by which it stops being a phone. "To me, it's a camera more than anything else."
For more on Brendan and his work, visit his site here.
