The cold, hard truth about those 'shot on iPhone' photos

If you've ever noticed those huge billboards and bus stop ads with 'shot on iPhone' in big, bold letters, you've probably also wondered if everything is quite as it seems.

Any photographer worth their salt will know that images shot on an iPhone would look terrible blown up so large, and more often than not your smartphone’s camera just doesn’t live up to the shots seen in those ads.

If you do look closely at the “Shot on an iPhone” tagline to Apple’s adverts, you’ll see “Additional equipment and software used” hiding in small font at the bottom of the video. So what exactly is this equipment and software?

In a new video, Marques Brownlee looks at the truth behind these claims. Sure, the images are shot on smartphones, but sometimes the equipment stuck on the end of the phone’s camera lens is making a world of difference.

As he reveals, attaching a cinematic lens with a gimbal and follow focus system onto the end of a Samsung or iPhone is not unusual in the high-end world of advertising photography.

That said, there's a lot of new technology available that will help you improve the images you take with your phone, with gimbals and high quality lens attachments the most popular. But then again, if you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just use your camera?