Skipping the Modes and Filters (My Opinion, Stated Plainly)
Okay. We've done light, we've done the grid, and now I want to talk about all those other buttons in your camera app. Portrait mode. The filters that show up when you swipe. Whatever your phone calls its "beauty" or "smart" mode.
I skip almost all of it. I want to tell you why, and then I want you to try skipping it too, at least for this next week, and see what you think.
My honest opinion
Here's the thing. Portrait mode blurs the background to make it look like you shot on a fancy camera with a nice lens. And it's fine, I guess, but it fakes it. The software guesses where the edges of your subject are, and it guesses wrong all the time. Look close at a portrait mode photo of a person and you'll see a stray piece of hair that's sharp when it should be blurry, or an ear that goes soft when it shouldn't. It looks almost right. Almost right bugs me more than just plain wrong.
Filters are the same problem in a different outfit. They dump a warm orange tint or a moody blue-gray over everything, and for about a year it looks cool, and then you look back at it and it looks dated, like a haircut you're embarrassed about. I have family photos from a few years back with that heavy warm filter on them and they all look the same shade of orange pancake. I'd rather have the real color.
So my opinion, and you can take it or leave it, is that the grid and tapping to focus beat portrait mode and filters every time. Learn to actually see the shot instead of asking the software to fake it for you. That's not fancy, it's just paying attention.
What to do instead
For the blur: if you want that soft background look, get physical distance working for you instead of software. Put more space between your subject and whatever's behind them. A kid standing right in front of a wall won't blur no matter what mode you use. That same kid standing ten feet in front of the wall, with you a few feet back, will start to blur naturally, real optics, no guessing algorithm involved. It won't be as dramatic as portrait mode. It'll also be accurate.
For the color: skip the filter and just get the light right, which, yes, is basically every lesson we've done so far. A quilt shot near a window in the morning doesn't need a filter. It already looks like itself, which is the whole goal.
For focus: you already know this one. Tap on the actual thing you want sharp. Don't let the phone decide.
Try this at home
Pick something ordinary. Your kid at the table, a plant on the windowsill, whatever's around. Take it once with portrait mode on. Take it again with it off, standing a little farther back if you want blur, tapping to focus on the main thing. Look at both side by side. I'm not going to tell you which one you'll like better. I have my opinion. See if you land somewhere close to it.
Where I'll admit defeat
I want to be straight with you that this approach doesn't solve everything. There's one thing on my own list I still haven't beaten, and it's the little diagonal miter at the corner of a quilt binding. That small folded triangle where the binding turns the corner. It's shiny in a specific way, thread and fold and a little bit of iron-shine all at once, and every time I try to photograph it up close, something goes sideways. Glare in one spot, the fold reads flat in another, the angle that shows the miter clearly is never the angle that shows the color clearly. No filter fixes that. No portrait mode fixes that either. I've just been shooting it over and over, moving my angle a few degrees at a time, and slowly getting less bad at it. That's genuinely most of what learning your camera looks like. Not a setting you flip. Just trying it again from two feet to the left.
So don't feel bad if something in your own life is being stubborn like that. Mine is a quilt corner. Yours might be your dog's face, or glass, or your kid who won't hold still. Keep at it one problem at a time.
Before next time
Try that side-by-side test, portrait mode versus you doing the distance and the tap-to-focus yourself, and notice which photo you reach for first without thinking about it.