If you are an iOS and iPhone user and you like photography, you will surely know a function of the camera with Live Photos. They arrived with the iPhone 6s when it arrived in 2015 and if it is activated, the phone records a few seconds before and after pressing the shutter so that an image is achieved with an animation that is activated by default in the photo library. But beyond the aesthetic section offer a function not very well known to many.
Live Photos allow us to apply different effects to our captures, one of them being a kind of long exposure that allows us to obtain very attractive photos. You just need to have a good pulse or better yet, a tripod and with these steps you can get amazing results. And without third-party applications.
Live Photos’ best kept secret
Each Live Photo records 1.5 seconds before pressing the camera button and 1.5 seconds after, and that’s the key to eye-catching photos. The Live Photo function is activated inside the camera by pressing the circular icon with a few dots. If it is in yellow it is activated. In my case I activate it only for certain photos that can benefit from this effect.
Just press the shutter button and we’ll capture three seconds of video. If we enter the “Photo Library” and click on the photo that we have just made with Live Photo we will see in the upper left area an icon with the name “Live”. We just have to click on it.
We will see how a contextual menu is displayed with three actions to apply on said photo: they are loop, bounce and long exposure, the latter being the one that achieves a still photo with striking effect.
And what we achieve is that those three seconds of video are grouped into a single frame so that everything that moves appears blurred. Hence the importance of a good pulse, so that what remains immobile is not altered by the movement of our hand.
If, for example, we take a photo in a street with people, it will appear blurred, while in a street with night traffic we will only see the bursts of lights prolonged in space. What’s more, we can reverse the effect at any time or remove the video effect from the photo and keep a single frame if we edit it.
In the App Store there are applications such as Specter Camera that offer a perhaps more refined result, but they are paid and in this case and thanks to iOS, the function is already included and we do not have to go through the box.