I recently filmed a wedding with the iPhone 15 Pro, and I want to tell you about my experience using this phone in a professional setting as a filmmaker, and share with you four pros and two cons of using it to film weddings.
I’ve also already made a full behind the scenes video where I show you exactly how I filmed the wedding with the iPhone 15 Pro, so go watch that if you want to see the day itself.
How Does The iPhone 15 Pro Handle Lowlight, High ISO Video?
Getting right into it, the first thing I want to discuss is probably what you have the biggest question about, and that is how my experience was with low light.
It has a small sensor, and while iPhones have gotten better at low light photography, how did this phone handle filming a dark wedding reception?
Well, here’s where I was pleasantly surprised, and this is the first pro of filming with the iPhone 15 Pro. If you use the main 1x, 24mm camera on the phone, it is surprisingly decent in low light. It’s no full frame a7S III or FX3, don’t get me wrong, but the footage was surprisingly clean and extremely usable.
The reception I was filming had some of the venue lights on for the formal dances, but once the dance floor opened up, all of the other lights were turned off and there were only two spotlights shining on the dance floor. Even with that, the phone handled it like a champ, with the footage still looking quite clean and usable.
First CON Of Using The iPhone To Film A Wedding
Now that said, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, because this talk about low light leads us into the first con of using your iPhone to film a wedding. While the 1x 24mm main lens performs admirably in low light, the same cannot be said for the 5x zoom lens.
In short, unless you’re filming in broad daylight, I would not expect stellar performance from the 120mm phone lens.
This proved true time and time again on the wedding day. I was filming the couple outdoors, but it was a cloudy day, not as bright as it would have been if the sun had been out, and I could see noise in my footage because the iPhone had to raise the ISO a bit to compensate.
I could especially see the long lens struggling during the ceremony once the sun had started to set. There was a moment where I was filming the couple walking down the aisle together and I switched from the 120mm zoom lens to the wider 24mm main lens, and when I did that it almost felt like I was filming with two different cameras, because the footage was significantly cleaner and better looking on the wider lens.
The reception proved it again whenever I was filming the couple give a toast, and the wide angle shot looked so much cleaner than the tight one.
In a perfect world, I can’t help but wish the iPhone had a fourth lens that was 50mm or 85mm instead of 120mm, so it wouldn’t punch in quite so much, and ideally with a bit larger sensor and better low light performance.
Weight & Ease Of Swapping Lenses
Moving back to pros, I absolutely loved how compact and lightweight my setup was. The iPhone is so much lighter than even the lightest mirrorless camera, and whenever you combine that with a lightweight gimbal like the DJI Osmo Mobile 6 and a phone case that accepts filters, like the Freewell Sherpa I used all day, it was honestly a dream.
Another pro was that I didn’t have to stop filming to switch lenses. I’m someone who typically films weddings with prime lenses, so I often find myself needing to swap between focal lengths. But with the iPhone, swapping lenses is a simple button press, and that saved me so much time on the wedding day.
There was one time in particular where the photographer started to get in my way, and all I had to do was tap to change focal length, and suddenly he wasn’t there because I zoomed in so quickly. It’s so cool!
Where’s The Bokeh?!
Back to cons now, because I need to share the final con I experienced filming with the iPhone 15 Pro, and that was the lack of bokeh, regardless of which camera lens I was using.
Keep in mind that this phone has very small camera sensors, which means that cinematic blurred background you’d typically get from an APS-C or full frame camera is much more difficult. Yes, there’s a cinematic mode that will artificially add bokeh and mimic filming with a shallow depth of field, but that can introduce a lot of artifacts and I didn’t want to risk it, so I did not use that setting when filming the wedding.
Because of that, I found that if I used the main camera and got really close to something I could get a bit of bokeh. I especially noticed this when I was filming flowers before the ceremony, where I could shoot up close and get some separation.
But in my opinion, the biggest time I noticed a lack of bokeh was when I was using the longer 120mm lens. Because when you’re using a bigger mirrorless camera, you can usually expect a longer lens to give you more bokeh. With the iPhone, that wasn’t the case.
My worst experience with this came when filming the groom giving a toast. Not only was the footage noisy, like we talked about earlier, there was also an exit sign behind the groom’s head. If I’d been filming with a full frame camera I have no doubt the bokeh would have greatly reduced how noticeable that sign was. But the iPhone has essentially no bokeh, so the exit sign was very clearly readable behind the person speaking, and it just looked awkward and distracting.
So just be aware. In my opinion the iPhone can work great as a wide angle gimbal camera that doesn’t have a lot of bokeh, but once you want to capture footage that looks super cinematic with extreme blurred backgrounds, you’re going to want to invest in a different camera.
Blackmagic Camera App Is The BEST!
Let’s finish with the last pro, and this one is one of the biggest in my opinion, and it’s just so dang cool.
Instead of filming this wedding with the stock camera app, which records massive footage at around six gigabytes per minute, I chose to use the Blackmagic Camera app, and that comes with a ton of benefits. Three of the biggest being that you have significantly more controls than the stock app, you can choose to film in the H.265 codec instead of ProRes, which gives you much smaller file sizes, and coolest of all, it has a camera to cloud feature.
I set up Blackmagic Cloud inside the Blackmagic Camera app, so I have an account there now, and I set up a project called iPhone Wedding Video. Now any time I record a clip using the Blackmagic Camera app, my phone automatically creates a proxy of that file and uploads it to Blackmagic Cloud, into that project. And whenever I get home to my desktop, I open up the iPhone Wedding Video project and the proxy clips are already sitting there ready to edit.
It’s mind blowing stuff. The first time I tested it, I set up a cloud project, recorded a few second long clip, stopped recording, looked over at my computer, and ten seconds later that clip was sitting in my Resolve project ready to be edited. It’s nuts.
Taking it back to this wedding, because I didn’t want to completely nuke my phone’s data plan, I got the venue’s WiFi password, and then as I filmed throughout the day the Blackmagic Camera app continually backed up proxy clips of everything I shot. When I got home, all of my footage was there waiting for me.
If you’re someone who is paranoid about losing footage and obsessed with backups like I am, imagine automatically having a backup generated nearly instantly every single time you film. It’s so reassuring.
Now to be clear, there are other camera companies working on similar features, and I’m really excited for them. Let me know if you want me to make a video about the camera to cloud capabilities of other cameras. But one thing that makes the iPhone special here is that it has a 5G wireless connection built in, so it can upload footage to the cloud seamlessly, whereas an FX3, for example, doesn’t have a built in wireless modem. Maybe the camera companies should add that. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Download My Gear Guide For Wedding Filmmakers
Speaking of things that are cool, if you haven’t downloaded my gear guide for wedding filmmakers yet, it is incredibly cool, and it is also completely free, and it’ll show you the exact gear I recommend buying to film weddings.
Let me know what you think of these pros and cons. Do you think the long lens struggling in low light and the lack of bokeh are dealbreakers?
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!