Photographer
Brooks Kraft has been covering the White House since 2000, and over the
years, he’s had plenty of opportunities to document the unveiling of
Christmas decorations at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This year, however,
he decided to mix things up a bit — and shot the event with Apple’s new
iPhone 6.
“I’ve
covered this event about 10 times before,” he told TIME. “It’s a very
light event, obviously, and the president is not even there. So there’s
no real, intrinsic news value, which is a good opportunity to try out
new gear that I might use later in more news-oriented environments.”
The
unveiling also offers Kraft and other journalists the rare opportunity
to walk freely around the grounds of the presidential residence,
“which," he notes, "you normally don’t get to do."
With
his mind set on getting a different sort of imagery than in previous
years, Kraft chose to shoot in the square format with an iPhone 6 Plus.
“I thought that format would work well with the formality of the
architecture in the White House, and it was a different way to look at
this event — compositionally.”
The
results, he feels, were good. “There are a lot of mixed lights in these
rooms and there’s also [natural] light, and the new iPhones do a really
good job of balancing colors right out of the camera. Kraft also likes
to shoot with an iPhone because it allows him to work rapidly. “The
iPhone has a lot of depth-of-field, which allows me to shoot the
[picture] and move around quickly, which worked in this situation
because we were sort of ushered through the rooms and didn’t have a lot
of time. I wanted to photograph most of the spaces with few people in
them, so the window of opportunity in which to shoot was brief.”
Kraft
uses both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but in this case, he wanted to test
the larger model’s new image stabilization technology, which is supposed
to help in low-light situations. “Some of the rooms are quite dark, and
I used the 6 Plus for that. And the larger screen also helps. There
were situations when I was holding the camera above my head to try to
make vertical lines more parallel on the edges of the frame, and in that
case having the larger screen helped me [compose the shot].”
Kraft
says the iPhone won’t replace his professional DSLR. “I look at the
iPhone as another piece of equipment. But the majority of my
professional work is shot on a DSLR.” Nevertheless, the iPhone can help
in certain situations. “I notice that people just don’t react the same
way [when you’re using an iPhone]. If you are looking to capture
something candid, people are so used to seeing mobile devices that their
reaction time is slower. You have a better chance of getting the shot,
and that was the case at the White House.”
Brooks Kraft’s five tips for shooting with an iPhone:
- Make sure you get the best exposure you can when you’re shooting, because it’s pretty hard to correct a bad exposure on the phone. It’s worth taking the extra minute to get it right.
- Don’t use the flash. Use ambient light instead.
- Don’t use the zoom function because it’s not an optical zoom. It’s just blowing up the pixels you have.
- Pay attention to the image settings of the app you’re using to photograph. Some will downsize your files. I use the native camera app because I’m sure to have a clean, maximum resolution file that I can go back to.
- Think about what you do with your images once you’ve shot them. There’s a tendency when you’re using a mobile device to let your images sit there instead of organizing them, archiving them or printing them. I really think that when people look back at their visual histories, they [might find big gaps in their archives].
Brooks Kraft is a freelance photographer based in Washington D.C. and a regular contributor to TIME.