014: How to Take Great IPhone Pictures with Andre Nguyen of iPhoneographyinsiders.com

I'm so excited about this episode, part of our Summer Camp series in which we are setting aside our usual four themes (3R's, Unplanned Adventures, Kids through the Ages, and Risky Business), pouring a nice tall glass of iced tea – or Long Island Ice Tea, depending on your age and what time of day it is – and going on vacation! We will return to our regularly scheduled programming in September, but for now… Let's just enjoy summer!

Great news! During our interview today iPhoneography teacher Andre Ngyen offers you a week's free coaching by email! You can find out how to get this bonus by listening to the episode. Speaking as a student of his I know you're not going to want to miss out; his great ideas will help you take fantastic family vacation pictures!

If you want to see the pictures I took with Andre's guidance, click here – that will take you to last week's blog post in which I previewed the pictures we talk about in today's episode. Enjoy!

If you have any desire at all to capture great summer memories, great photographs of your kids and family – and pets – using just your iPhone, then you are going to love today's guest. Andre Nguyen of iPhoneographyinsiders.com is first and foremost a talented photographer, but most importantly he really wants to help the rest of us take great pictures.

Today's conversation includes lots of fun stuff: summer memories, dog stories, my excitement about sharing when I got to go see this amazing art installation in Boston on the Rose Kennedy Greenway… and because Andre gave us so many tips and apps, I'm going to list them here:

• the first, easy and fun, is to simply tap the light source on your phone to completely change the amount of light in the picture; in other words, if you want a picture of your husband kissing the top of your baby's head with his son in the background, tap the sun – you'll end up with a silhouette picture! Really, really cool


• next, be playful – take a variety of pictures of the same scene, in which you have tapped different places on the screen (which left in different amounts of light), try different poses, see if you can capture your kids jumping in the picture, use your imagination


• when indoors, capturing enough light can be tough for the iPhone which results in grainy photographs where you literally see many pixels; Andre recommends using a strong light source and once again tapping on that light source on the iPhone screen


• a great app: photographer's ephemerist, which tells you the angle of the sun, and exactly where it will be setting in the sky, on any given day; Andre uses this to plan his sunset photography, knowing exactly where and when the sun will be passing specific buildings, and then he can pull out his iPhone and play


• another great app, Slow Shutter Cam,which allows you to let more light in and thus get cool blurry effects – if you take Andre's suggestion of doing a selfie on a merry-go-round with your children, please send it along! This sounds like the coolest idea in the world, my boys are too old for merry-go-rounds, I gotta see this in action :-)


• Andre's favorite website for getting prints of his photos is called artifactuprising.com, where he's gotten beautiful print of his pictures at decent prices


• on instagram, Andre goes by@AndreHarrison, and I just know you're going to want to head over to instagram and check out his artwork, which is amazing! You can also find it at his two websites: techminimalist.com and iPhoneographyinsiders.com

Once you start taking amazing pictures using Andre's tips, please email me some pictures! You can do that by going to weturnedoutokay.com/contact, or just emailing Karen@weturnedoutokay.com. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

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