In this article we completely depart from the usual theme of wildland fire and dip our toe into photography. So if you have no interest in that topic, scroll down to the next post.
When the new iPhone 7 Plus was introduced about a month ago Apple promised to add functionality to the phone’s camera in October that they called “Portrait Mode”. Yesterday the updated software, iOS 10.1, became available which enabled the feature.
This makes it possible to intentionally blur the background in a photo, leaving the foreground in focus. It changes the depth of field, that is, what is in focus. Photographers call this the “bokeh” effect and can help the viewer of the photo concentrate on the primary object without being distracted by the background. This is usually only possible with digital single lens reflex (SLR or DSLR) cameras.
The photos below that we shot this afternoon are first, the unaltered original, followed by the Portrait Mode effect of the same photo. It’s all done just by taking one photo, but you end up with two.
Apple does this by having two cameras in the iPhone 7 Plus, each with a different lens, 28mm and 56mm. In Portrait Mode the phone compares images from the lenses, triangulating to determine the distance to various objects. Then it decides to artificially blur the ones that are farther away.
This feature is only available in the iPhone 7 Plus, and is not included in the smaller iPhone 7.
