iPhone: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

The new iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 software have arrived, and New York Times tech columnist David Pogue is on top of it with a thoroughly updated edition of iPhone: The Missing Manual. Each custom-designed page helps you use your iPhone for everything from web browsing to watching videos. The iPhone is packed with possibilities, and with this handy book, you can explore them all.

iPhone 3GS Picture-Taking Goodies
by David Pogue
If you have an iPhone 3GS, then you’re in for some extra camera goodness. See the white box in the center of the screen? That’s telling you where the iPhone thinks the most important part of the photo is. That’s where it will focus; that’s what it examines to calculate the overall brightness of the photo (exposure); and that’s the portion that will determine the overall white balance of the scene (that is, the color cast). But often, dead-center is not the most important part of the photo. The cool thing is that you can tap somewhere else in the scene to move that white square—to make the camera recalculate the focus, exposure, and white balance. Here’s when you might want to do this tapping:
1) When the whole image looks too dark or too bright. If you tap a dark part of the scene, you’ll see the whole photo brighten up; if you tap a bright part, the whole photo will darken a bit. You’re telling the camera, “Redo your calculations so this part has the best exposure; I don’t really care if the rest of the picture gets brighter or darker.”
2) When the scene has a color cast. If the photo looks, for example, a little bluish or yellowish, tap a different spot in the scene—the one you care most about. The iPhone recomputes its assessment of the white balance.
3) When you’re in macro mode. If the foreground object is very close to the lens—4 to 8 inches away—the iPhone automatically goes into macro (super closeup) mode. In this mode, you can do something really cool: You can defocus the background. The background goes soft, slightly blurry, just like the professional photos you see in magazines. Just make sure you tap the foreground object.