Wondering whether the iPhone 18 Pro is worth the upgrade for your photography? I recently found myself somewhere I wasn't expecting to be: the Apple Store in Leeds, swapping my iPhone 15 Pro Max for the new 18 Pro!
For years I've told people on my walks and lessons that a movable aperture isn't worth the trouble in a phone. Now I've bought one. Here's what I found in my first week with it, from a landscape workshop at the Norber Erratics to a family trip underground into a cave.
If you'd rather watch than read, the full video is below. It starts beside a patch of ivy buzzing with life (I do talk about ivy a lot), until the wind and the traffic send me back to the studio.
Smaller Phone, Longer Day: Moving Up from the 15 Pro Max
The first thing I noticed is how much nicer the 18 Pro feels in the hand. I've gone from a Pro Max to the standard Pro, so the screen is smaller and so is the battery. Even so, the battery is definitely outlasting my old 15 Pro Max, which I wasn't expecting.
A quick caveat: I skipped the 16 and the 17, so I can't give you a fair comparison with those. Between the 15 and the 18, though, I'm a pretty happy chap.
Eating My Words: The Movable Aperture Explained
Aperture is the opening in the lens that lets light in. Its size is described by the f-number, which works backwards: a lower number means a wider opening and more light, a higher number means a narrower opening and less light.
On the 18 Pro, only the 1x camera has a movable aperture. That's the main camera of the three on the back, the one the phone uses when you first open the camera app. Tap the aperture button and you'll find f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4.
If you've been on a workshop or a lesson with me in the last 10 to 15 years, you'll have heard me say that camera phones don't have a movable aperture, because the effort and the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. So here I am, days after last saying it, with one in my pocket.
Is it a gimmick? A bit, I'll admit. It does look cool: I filmed it opening and closing through a macro lens (a lens for extreme close-ups) and it's quite something to watch. It has real advantages too, mostly in low light, which I'll come to below. First, though, the thing most people expect it to do, which it mostly doesn't.
Depth of Field (DoF) on a Phone: Use Your Feet, Not the F-Number
Most people think of aperture as the way to control depth of field. For anyone unsure, DoF is a term used to describe an area of focus: how much of your picture, from front to back, looks sharp.
On a mirrorless camera, a higher f-number gives you more in focus and a lower one gives you less. On a phone, the lens and sensor (the chip that records the image) are so small that you won't really see that difference by changing the f-number. Your position does the work instead.
Large Depth of Field
This is for landscapes, where you want everything sharp from the rocks at your feet to the hills behind.
Step back a little from the nearest thing in your frame.
Focus around a third of the way into the scene (tap the screen with your finger at that point).
The further away you focus, the more of the scene will be sharp.
Shallow Depth of Field
This is for flowers, details and portraits, where you want your subject sharp and the background soft.
Get close to your subject. The closer you are, the shallower the area of focus.
Put plenty of distance between your subject and the background. The further away it is, the softer it gets.
What about Portrait mode? On iPhones before the 18, the blurred background and the f-number slider in Portrait mode are a software effect: the phone blurs the background for you. My advice has always been to photograph normally and add any software effects in the edit afterwards, so you keep the choice. With iPhones, I've always found it hard to see exactly where the hardware ends and the software begins.
Underground and After Dark: Where f/1.48 Earns Its Keep
This is where the movable aperture makes sense. At f/1.48 the lens opens wide and lets in much more light, which is exactly what you want in dim places. I took it underground into a cave with the family, about as low light as it gets. It should come into its own at night too.
There's a catch. I haven't tested image quality myself yet, but from other reviews I've watched, there's a small drop in quality at f/1.48. So the range gives you a choice:
In low light, open up to f/1.48 and accept a little less image quality in return for more light.
In brighter conditions, use a narrower aperture and put image quality first.
That's what photography is always about really: choosing the right compromise for the situation you're in.
Starbursts
Starbursts are the spiky star shapes that form around a bright point of light, like the sun peeping past a rock or a streetlight at night. The 18 Pro produces some lovely ones, and they do seem to change with the aperture. I can't tell yet whether that's all the aperture or whether there's some software at work too, but I like the look. If you have an 18 Pro, try the same shot at f/1.48 and at f/4 and compare the stars.
The Real Reason I Upgraded: Manual Controls and a Live Histogram
The big thing that pushed me into the Apple Store was manual control. It isn't a full manual mode, but you can now change the shutter speed and the aperture in the phone's own camera app.
Shutter speed is how long the camera lets light in for. A fast shutter speed freezes movement, like a bird taking off. A slow one blurs it, like a waterfall turning silky, so rest the phone on something steady when you try it.
I know there are third-party apps that give you control over the cameras, and I don't know how quickly they'll be able to work with the new aperture. Having it built into the camera app, though, felt like a powerful thing.
The Live Histogram
The other bonus is a live histogram on the screen. A histogram is a graph of the brightness in your picture, with the darkest parts (the shadows) on the left and the brightest (the highlights) on the right. I always have one switched on in my mirrorless cameras, and it's lovely to have one on the phone too.
Bunched up against the right-hand edge: your highlights are burning out, turning bright areas like the sky plain white with no detail. Darken the picture a touch.
Bunched up against the left-hand edge: your shadows are too dark and losing detail. Brighten things up.
On an iPhone, tap the screen and slide the little sun icon down to darken or up to brighten.
The histogram isn't on by default, so you'll need to switch it on in the menu first. There's also a customisable row of tools along the top of the screen, where you can keep your favourites, like the f-number and the histogram, within easy reach. Manual control and a histogram on screen are what made this a worthwhile jump from the 15 for me, with no regrets.
Pixel Peeping: How Good Is a Phone Camera, Really?
Before anyone rushes out to buy an 18 Pro on the strength of me waxing lyrical, a word on image quality. Pixel peeping means zooming right in, to 100% or 200%, to inspect the fine detail in a photo. If you're on a quest for the ultimate image quality, a camera phone was never going to get you there. The bigger sensors in mirrorless cameras and DSLRs are where you'll find the best detail, pixel for pixel.
That said, I'm confident you can take a really good photo on the 18 Pro without cropping and print it at A4 certainly, and A3 too, and be very happy with it. I'm a pixel peeper myself, but it's easy to forget that nobody else is zooming in at 100 or 200% on your photos. Heavy cropping is a different matter, because you're throwing pixels away, so it's worth filling the frame when you take the shot.
For a phone that also has a camera, it's very impressive.
Half the Battle: A Camera That Makes You Want to Go Out
If you've got a camera that makes you excited to take photos, that's half the battle, and that's how the 18 Pro feels to me right now. I'm looking forward to taking it out on my walks over the next year.
Not into phones? Well done for reading this far. There's plenty of mirrorless and DSLR content on the way, because I'm keen to test things and share the results. Next up on YouTube is a noise test between mirrorless systems with different sized sensors, shot on an astrophotography outing. Noise is the grainy speckling you see in photos taken in low light. We'll look at how sensor size affects it, and how back-illuminated sensors (a sensor design that captures light more efficiently) compare.
Camera Phone Photo Walk: Early Spring Flowers, Ilkley, 27 February
Your phone, the first flowers of the year, and a morning to see what it can really do. My autumn and Christmas camera phone walks are both full, so the next chance to join me is Saturday 27 February 2027 in Ilkley. We'll photograph spring blooms up close, putting those shallow depth of field ideas into practice on whatever phone you carry. Learn more
