Name: The iPhone Photography Trick You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner
Uploaded: 2026-02-22T10:01:28.000Z
Duration: 18 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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In this video, I'm going to show you how to capture incredible reflection photos with your iPhone.

To-infinitive

Now, if your goal is to capture the kind of images that really stand out and that really attract the attention of the viewer, you should try to show the world to people like they've never seen it before.

And one great way to accomplish that goal is by including reflections in your photos.

You might be wondering, where can you find opportunities for reflection photography?

Well, it turns out that these opportunities are almost everywhere.

And as a photographer, you have to learn to recognize them.

And that is a topic that we'll come back to over and over again in this course.

There are great photo opportunities all around you, but

you as a photographer, have to train your mind to recognize those photo opportunities so that you'll know what to look for and how to use these opportunities to get the best shots possible.

Now, in order to take reflection photos, the first thing you're going to need is a reflective surface.

And there's a lot of different things you could use as a reflective surface.

Perhaps the most common example is the surface of water.

Whenever you have a surface of water, and

this could be a lake, a river, the sea, or just a tiny little puddle in the city, that is a great opportunity for reflection photos.

But of course, it's not just water where you can capture reflection photos.

You could literally use anything that reflects light, including things like ice, glass surfaces, storefronts, shiny cars, or any other things that reflect light.

So there are reflective surfaces all around.

You just have to learn how to recognize them.

All right, that's enough talking for now.

Let me show you how to capture beautiful reflection photos with the iPhone.

So right now, I'm standing on this beach, and

what's interesting about this specific spot is that we have these puddles that are kind of all around me.

And those puddles, to me, represent a reflection photography opportunity.

Now, if I look at the sea itself, you'll see there are waves.

And those waves, as beautiful as they are, are going to prevent me from capturing a mirror like reflection.

With that said, if I walk just a little bit away from the sea here, closer to these puddles, I think I'll have a better shot of capturing reflections.

Now, what we also have here is my daughter, Emily.

It's a beautiful, warm evening, and she's going to be the subject for our reflection photos.

Now, one of the first things you're going to notice when you look at the screen of my iPhone is that if I'm standing up here, if I'M taking this shot from the height of a standing person.

You don't really see much of a reflection.

But look what happens as I start to get lower.

the lower I get with my iPhone, the more that reflection starts to stand out.

And something else is happening at the same time.

As I lower my iPhone and as it gets closer and closer to the surface of water, everything is eliminated from behind my daughter.

Now I have my daughter with just that sky in the background.

You're also going to see that since we have those waves, I don't get a perfect mirror like reflection.

I think it's interesting because it distorts the reflection.

But if those waves get too strong, then the reflection might just disappear altogether.

There's one more thing I have to be careful with, and that is the focus.

Now, the auto focus of the iPhone usually works really well, but

here I'm presenting my iPhone as a really challenging situation because it doesn't really know exactly where I want to focus.

I know I want to focus on my subject, but

the iPhone looks at the entire scene and half of the image is really close to me.

It's literally right here reflected in the water.

And what that means is that the auto focus will often set focus much closer than it should be.

In other words, the focus might accidentally get set on that water in the foreground rather than my subject in the background.

So if I want to be absolutely sure that the image will be in focus, I need to tap and hold my finger on my subject.

And now both focus and exposure are locked on my daughter Emily.

I'm going to see I can get my daughter to stand up.

I think that would make for a nicer reflection shot.

That reflection is getting distorted just a little bit.

Not too much, but just enough to give these photos a nice distortion.

Alright, so here the reflection is no longer appearing in the water.

And that actually creates for a better reflection, or at least a cleaner reflection, I should say.

So I can really create a beautiful mirror like image.

And for these mirror like compositions, the way you typically frame them is with a symmetrical composition.

So you'd make sure you have just as much space above the horizon as you do below the horizon, and

that way you can create a perfectly symmetrical reflection photo.

Now my daughter is playing in the sand, and that does look kind of cool.

We have that perfect mirror like reflection.

And I think I got the exact shot that I was looking for.

And while I'm really happy about how that shot turned out, I don't want you to get the wrong idea that reflection photography is something you can just do on the beach.

There are great opportunities for reflection photography pretty much everywhere.

So for the next part of this video, we're going to head to city center to see what kind of reflection photos we can capture there.

This time, we've come to the city, and it was just raining earlier today, and

we still have some puddles scattered around here.

And I think that could also be a really unique reflection photo opportunity.

Now, in this specific location, I'm going to attempt to do something more difficult.

I'm going to try to capture the kind of shot where I have a person reflected in the puddle.

Now, that's going to be a more challenging shot because obviously, I don't control other people, and

I have to make sure I frame it up exactly right so that all I see in that puddle is the reflection of the person.

So let me get out my iPhone and let's frame up this shot.

Now, from this angle, I'm pretty much looking straight down at the puddle.

And that's why I don't have much of a reflection at all.

So I need to reposition myself and take just a few steps back.

And as I start to do that, you'll see that this reflection is coming into the frame.

And now that building in the background that is appearing in the reflection.