Stabilize
While the temptation is irresistible to hold your iPhone (or any video acquiring device), it's critical to give it a solid place to shoot, even if you're moving it around or going for the all too prolific NYPD Blue floating frame. Even that's been stabilized.
Mounts for your iPhone aren't as hard to come by as they may seem. Visit any auto parts store and you can find a mount for your device with which a little ingenuity and some duct tape can convert it into a tripod mount. A table, a sandbag, a fender, a rock, a spring clamp, you're surrounded by stability. The iPhone 4S has image stabilization. Any image stabilization sucks power.
Clarify
No app, no non-linear tool, nothing can compensate for obscurity except your careful eye. Something that's a bit more fundamental to stay on top of if you're pulling focus with the right apparatus, but all you have to work with on your iPhone is its auto focus feature.
It's one that may test your patience, but the payoff of clarity is worth it. When the camera is recording you can navigate what's in focus by tapping on the screen. The square that appears indicates the area wherein focus is pulled along with exposure and color balance. This is especially critical in macro-type shooting, where your iPhone lens can pull focus just beyond three inches.
It's critical to remember while you're shooting to tap-tap often when your focal distance changes, when your light changes from one color temperature to another, and when your exposure changes, even a little one or two-stop difference going from the shrubs to the the trees. Watch carefully for focus, color temperature and exposure continuity, which is tough to do since iPhone video offers no standard, no f-stops, no focal distances to go by.
It's been kind of nice, though, not to have to worry about all those numbers, trusting the eye instead.
More pixels means more clarity as well, and more can be had with the iPhone 4S, graduating from 780i to 1080p.
Expose
Back in the day Canon introduced an exposure feature that followed the pupil of the photographer's eye while it tracks the subject in the view finder. Autofocus and and exposure would follow suit, adjusting for where the eye would land. iPhone follows your finger instead. While rolling, track the AF square to the area for which you wan tot expose and watch the adjustment happen before your eyes. Use this tool to pull detail our of highlights or shadows.
I've put the AF square over the shrub and tapped twice to pull focus and exposure in that area. See while I'm able to bring out detail in the shadows, I've compromised my exposure in the rest of the frame.
By tapping on an element that will give the most medium value in exposure, such as the trunk of the tree...
...the exposure compensates and the color temperature balances as well.
Touching on the sky, the brightest part of the composition shifts exposure beyond, trying to find detail in the highlights, losing most detail in the shadows.
Exposure is a balance and while there may be ways to tweak poor exposure in post production, nothing makes production cleaner and more aesthetic than getting it right the first time.
Horizontal
What may be a foregone conclusion for photographers is something that needs to be said to iPhone shooters who have the habit of shooting stills vertically. Rotate ninety degrees, please. Think horizontal. Think film aspect ratio.
This.
Not this.
Cover
Know your context, it will dictate your coverage. Coverage is the photography you capture to tell the story with perspective. Coverage consists of shots; establishing, long, medium, follows, cut-aways, close-ups, extreme close-ups.
Move
Want to move the film plane? Check this out:
Illuminate
Light is cheap. It's everywhere, especially during the day. iPhone video loves light, lots of it. The principles discussed in my post Light Defines Form all apply.
Frame
I wrote in Slumming with an iPhone, "Zoom lenses are handy, but they're spoilers more so. If you don't like what the frame is giving, rotate the barrel and change your focal length. You don't have to move to get the composition, compromising truer compositional forces along the way.
"Any fixed focal range finder makes you move, closer, father, higher, lower to get the frame where your discerning eye sees the golden mean, the power of line, the gestalt of context, but you're still limited to that tiny little parallax-corrected view finder.
The iPhone has a hella big view finder in 5:4 freeing up the eye to move as if it would on the print, recognizing, at least for my eye, new combinations of principled composition with avant garde influences. I think that means that it makes it easier to bend if not break a few compositional rules.
It also allows the eye to see in shadows and highlights, recognize the influence of texture, pulling something interesting out of what the naked eye might see as mundane."
