This iPhone has so many doodads!

Why didn’t anyone tell me about Portrait Mode before?

One of the things about having a lot of time off is allowing myself to rabbit-hole into a many non-critical activities.

Such as trying out all the doo-dads on my iPhone.

To wit- I recently found that my new iPhone has a camera feature known as “portrait mode”. Did you know about this?

I had seen it shortly after I upgraded, but chose to ignore it for months. I assumed that this feature forced you to never be in Landscape. Which seemed sort of pointless. And also, if this was the case, why wasn’t there a Landscape Mode doo-dad?

Anyway, my daughter set me straight.

She explained that my presumptions were deeply flawed. And also that I was an idiot. And that I was embarrassing her. (I should note she is 13).

Anyway, no doubt years after it became standard, I now understand Portrait Mode: It puts clarity and focus on the primary subject of the photo, and blurs out the background. Suddenly, cool dads like me can shoot photos like a pro!

So here is my first foray into portrait mode.

As you can see in this picture of my daughter eating a burrito, she is in focus and the background is professionally washed out:

While Portrait Mode is presumably for portraits of people, I next experimented by creating a “portrait” of her bottle of tea:

It looks great, right? Next I went for a portrait of the salt shaker:

Really, clear as day isn’t it? I was loving this new Portrait Mode! Finally, as a bit of a coup de grace, I attempted a portrait of a simple spoon:

Simple spoon for the win!

Next up: what is “pano”?