[Image: Konstantin Chalabov]

You might recall that in November last year, Seth took his new iPhone 11 out for a spin, declaring the camera a “game-changer”.

He took a few snaps of Cabine du Cap at night in lighting that, in his words, “would make photos on the previous model iPhone seem almost completely black”.

It looks like Seth was on to something, as always, because Night Mode, on the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max has been inspiring a lot of creativity and talk in tech circles.

If you haven’t discovered this feature yet, or you’re thinking of upgrading your iPhone to one of the latest models, here’s MacRumours with what Night Mode is, and how it works:

Night Mode, as the name suggests, lets you take photos in the evening, with lighting that has never before been possible on an iPhone thanks to new hardware and new machine learning algorithms. Though Night Mode brightens photos, it also preserves the night time feeling, balancing the light and dark elements of an image.

Night Mode is an automatic setting, so if you have an iPhone 11, you’ve probably been using it without realising that it’s behind the insane quality of your nighttime shots.

Night mode uses the new sensor along with machine learning and the Neural Engine in the A13 processor to create Night Mode shots.

When Night Mode is engaged, the cameras in the ‌iPhone‌ analyze the available amount of light and then the ‌iPhone‌ chooses the number of frames needed to create a suitable image. The camera then takes a series of images for a set amount of time, such as one second, three seconds, five seconds, or in some situations, even longer.

It lets the phone pull out the best parts of the scene by taking a series of snaps. The A13 chip in the ‌iPhone‌ analyses each photo taken, aligns them to account for movement, tosses out the images that are too blurry, and then combines all the sharpest images in the set, resulting in one perfect picture.

Apple is clearly proud of this feature (and rightly so) because it put together a contest for the best photographs shot on Night Mode on the new iPhones.

According to Mashable, the company announced the winners, chosen by a panel of experts and Apple execs.

At the top of this story, you’ll find one of the six winners, Konstantin Chalabov’s stunning photo of a snowy night scene in Moscow.

Below, take in the rest of the winners in all their glory:

Photo: Rustam Shagimordanov

Photo: Mitsun Soni

Photo: Rubén P. Bescós

Photo: Yu “Eric” Zhang

Photo: @houdini_logic / Instagram

We can talk for hours about how Night Mode works, but at the end of the day, those pictures are worth a thousand words.

If you’d like to upgrade your photography and phone game, head on over to Digicape, South Africa’s largest independent Apple retailer, to browse the range.

While you’re there take a look around. They’ve changed things up a bit, and the site is looking pretty slick…

[sources:macrumours&mashable]