I got a wild hair to do something I’ve never really done. I walked around at night with just my iPhone and a tripod. Things die down at the Key Largo resort pretty early and aside from a couple of workers heading home for the day I had the property to myself. The entire beach and marina areas were clear. The pool was all mine. It was an excellent evening. Even the breeze cooperated!

I’ve been experimenting a lot on this trip. Not only am I trying to push the most out of the Fujifilm X-H1 but I’m also trying to build my confidence and artistic results with the iPhone. I always have the phone with me and I really want to do more than just grab quick snaps that are uninspiring. This deviates a little since night photography is obviously going to be better with a tripod but I wanted to try out the phone’s night mode on the tripod before going handheld.

Overall, I think the results are pretty amazing. It doesn’t work 100% but when it does it’s very nice. When you’re working with long exposures (upwards of 30s) you have to expect some motion blur. In some cases it adds to the image but not always.

Something I need to learn is how to adjust the exposure. It seems as though you can select auto or max. When I tried setting something in between, the phone would just jump to one of the others depending on which way I was scrolling. For example, sometimes that phone would decide that I needed a 12s exposure but due to some of the lighting that would cause hot spots. I felt that 5s or 7s might work better but couldn’t select them. Hopefully just operator error.

Anyway, here are some images I captured with the iPhone’s Night Mode. Take a look and let me know what you think.