The iPhone’s Portrait mode uses computational photography to simulate the shallow depth of field of a digital SLR or mirrorless camera with a larger sensor. It’s evolved from a very crude tool into something which is now pretty convincing, but it’s still no substitute for the real thing.

There are some circumstances in which you can get genuine shallow-ish depth of field with an iPhone shot, but these are very limited as we’ll discuss. The Sandmarc 2x telephoto lens is a much more practical way to get true optical blurring when shooting portraits …

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