I ghostwrote this article for my wife. So, she took all the photos that appear, but I wrote all the words. This article appeared first on the Van Elk & Co. blog, but it was also published on Petapixel. Mark Dunsmir wrote about this article for fStoppers as well. This article actually went to a bunch of different publications, because it was a bit incendiary to wedding professionals, but Petapixel and fStoppers are the important ones. It was incendiary because the idea that someone could take wedding photos with an iPhone in portrait mode and possibly get professional-looking photos wasn’t a welcome idea in the industry. Here’s a bit of the article:

“The iPhone struggles when there isn’t a face...”

— Steven Van Elk

The iPhone struggles when there isn’t a face to know what should be in focus and what shouldn’t be in focus. The best luck we had was when the iPhone just gave up on trying to do Portrait mode and took a regular photo, or when we switched over to the regular photo mode.
For flat lay stuff, this worked great. For photos of the dress hanging or candles on tables or cakes, it was pretty obvious there wasn’t a shallow depth of field in the photo, or at it’s worst there was a shallow depth of field but it wasn’t consistent.
The “getting ready” shots of the bride and groom looked great. We did pick the best photos, but this was a part of the day where it just felt like everything clicked and worked flawlessly.

Click through on one of the links above to read the full review of the day. In addition to shooting the wedding with an iPhone 11 Pro in portrait mode, we also shot the wedding with Canon 5D Mark IVs. So at the end of the article you can see comparison photos showing the difference between the iPhone and what the DSLRs were capturing.