Austin Mann Leaves the iPhone 18 Pro Aperture on Auto

Photographer Austin Mann spent a week with the iPhone 18 Pro camera in Colorado and told readers to leave its new variable aperture on Auto. The Camera app, he wrote, is usually better at picking the stop than he is.

He still opened the lens to f/1.48 for a new-moon sky, then used the new Pro tools to make frames look darker, softer, and more like film than like a computational iPhone still. Apple began selling the phones on September 18, a day after his review went up.

Leave the New Aperture on Auto

Apple announced the hardware on September 9: a 48MP Fusion Main camera whose iris moves among four stops, with six laser-cut aperture blades on a new rotor. The company says that wide-open setting brings around 50 percent better low-light performance than last year’s Pro, whose main lens was fixed at f/1.78.

Mann based the test at Dunton River Camp in southwest Colorado, then published a week-long field test in Colorado on September 17. He checked the moon phase before the first night, caught a new moon, and shot the Milky Way at 10 seconds. The pictures are the reason people keep waiting on his September posts.

My pre-release iPhone 18 Pro camera review is live from Dunton, Colorado! pic.twitter.com/IUJE4ZiFVo

— Austin Mann (@austinmann) September 17, 2026

The advice that will actually change how owners shoot is smaller than the iris. He leaves Auto on unless he wants shallow depth, motion blur, or a sunstar.

I recommend leaving your aperture in Auto. The camera is very, very good at picking the best aperture for the scene, and it’s usually better at it than me. Inside at dinner? f/1.48, auto-selected. Outside with plenty of light and depth? It picks a higher f-stop to keep everything in focus.

Austin Mann, photographer, Dunton field review

THE FOUR STOPS ON THE 1X LENS

The 48MP Fusion Main camera specs list those four openings on the 24mm lens. He calls the whole mechanism better photos for everyone, because Auto can now open for dim rooms and stop down when a group needs to stay sharp.

The Quiet Surprise in Pro Controls

The keynote talk was the iris. What stopped Mann in the Camera app was manual focus, which he says was not mentioned on stage. Photographers have asked for years to split focus from exposure, and the 18 Pro finally does it in the stock app, with focus peaking that he says works quite well.

One of the most-asked-for features by photographers has been the ability to separate exposure and focus, and now we can! All you do is set your focus manually (with focus peaking that works quite well!) and then tap where you want to expose.

Austin Mann, photographer, Dunton field review

That split is why many of them still pay for Halide. He used it on a window at the Dunton store, where autofocus kept grabbing the glass and he wanted the mountain reflection instead. Manual focus held El Diente and the Wilson Range in the pane.

Pro controls also put shutter speed, white balance, and a live histogram in the native app, on both iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. He customizes the top bar so aperture, shutter, focus mode, exposure bias, Night mode, and file format sit in one row. The new layout has so many switches that he still loses his place, which is the other half of the story.

How Austin Mann Gets a Film Look

Photographic Styles 3 adds texture and grain on top of the old tone and color pad. At a ranch that already feels like another century, he chased analog on purpose: chunkier grain in the shadows, a little halation on bright edges, less of the HDR sheen people now read as “iPhone.”

Look at the Dunton saloon bar, he says, and you can see a soft halo on the highlight, plus a signature that local legend ties to Butch Cassidy after a Telluride bank job. He likes that glow until it goes too far, which is why the Film slider exists.

MANN’S FILM RECIPE

• Exposure: Shoot dark, about -1.0, and wide open at f/1.48.
• Focus: Use manual focus so the file goes slightly softer, which he treats as a feature.
• File: Shoot HEIF, because Photographic Styles attach to that format, not to ProRAW.
• Tone pad: In Photos, park the D-Pad dot in the lower right to cut the HDR look, crunch shadows, and blow highlights, then ease Film back if halation gets loud.

He rarely shoots ProRAW now, except on stars and other dim scenes where he wants to drive grain and noise reduction in Lightroom. Styles he actually used at Dunton include Quiet, Gold, Amber, Natural, Vibrant, Stark B&W, and a Glow look on portraits of the wrangler, Sophia. The point of the new hardware, in his hands, is to get out of the way of that mood.

Shutter Drag Finally Lives in the Camera App

Freezing action was never the iPhone’s problem. Default shutter speeds are already short. Blur was the fight, and it is one of the main reasons Mann still opened Halide. On the 18 Pro he stopped down to f/4, held still, and dragged the shutter to 1/15 for a waterfall at Dunton Hot Springs.

A second frame used 1/60 while he panned with riders, so the horses stayed readable and the trees smeared. Neither shot needed a third-party app. That is a quiet change for anyone who has been fighting the phone’s habit of making every splash look like a cut-glass still.

Taylor McKay shot the companion film. Mann walks through the night work, the iris, and the film grain on location, including a tractor lit from off-camera with an iPhone flashlight after he focused at infinity at f/1.48.

Why Focus Tracking Matters at f/1.48

He was not eager to test Focus Tracking, because iPhone autofocus already sticks for most of his work. At f/1.48 the plane of focus gets thin, and close subjects move. A flower in wind, even on a tripod, kept drifting out. Double-tap lock, he found, holds the subject when either the camera or the bloom shifts.

The same trick helps when a distant subject sits behind grass or branches. He calls the feature super helpful and better than he expected, which is the sort of line he does not throw at every September bullet. Smart focus tracking is the name on Apple’s spec sheet; in the field it is the tool that makes the new wide-open stop usable on things that do not sit still.

The rest of the lens set is last year’s set, and he is glad. The 4x 100mm that felt right on iPhone 17 Pro is still the telephoto. Some shooters still want a shorter 70mm, but Mann says the eight-lens layout already fits how he works, so Apple’s decision to leave it alone is the right kind of boredom.

A Notary Stamp for the Sensor

Apple Reference Image is the other new mode that has nothing to do with bokeh. Mann’s first question was why it is not just a RAW or DNG, which already resist casual edits. The difference, as he reads it, is the signature. A RAW in a drawer is probably genuine. A Reference Image is the same original with a notary stamp.

Apple says the new main sensor can sign every pixel it sees, then Private Cloud Compute develops an unalterable reference file that sits beside the working photo in Photos, like a digital negative. Mann’s demo is blunt: original signed frame, then Clean Up rewriting the scene, then the altered picture people would actually post.

He wants that stamp on insurance claims, landlord move-in sets, and marketplace listings, and he would like Instagram to show a verified mark the way Leica and Sony already sign files with Content Credentials. The timing is the camera team handing over tools that reshape a photo in the same year it hands over a way to prove what the sensor saw.

Mann Still Wants a Dedicated Pro Camera App

Time-lapse in the native app is finally 4K with Dolby Vision, up from 1080p, so a ranch clip can match the rest of a 4K video. He even pulled a still from a 4K time-lapse when the light hit a stand of trees. Adaptive time-lapse, which slows down when it sees motion, still puzzles him.

WHAT HE STILL WANTS

• A Pro Camera app: Final Cut Camera exists for filmmakers; he wants the same idea for stills, because the new controls are easy to lose mid-shot.
• Grain amount: He likes how smart the grain is, but he wants a quiet polish, not a look you always notice.
• Time-lapse speed: Fast, Faster, Fastest after you stop recording, instead of one baked pace.
• SmartTake on Pro: The group-ready shutter he tried on iPhone Duo is not on 18 Pro, and he wants it in the field.

Starting price is $1,199, in black, silver, glacier, and a new burgundy. He did not publish a buy-or-skip grid this year. The close he did write is the useful one: for most of the iPhone’s life the camera’s job was a sharp, color-accurate file, and that is still what most people need. This year he can drag a shutter and put film scars in on purpose, even when the result is not technically correct. He signs off with David Alan Harvey: “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.”

On the first night at Dunton he opened to f/1.48, focused at infinity, and let a flashlight from off-frame pick up a tractor under a dark sky. Auto would have made a clean night picture. He wanted the one that felt like being there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What aperture settings does the iPhone 18 Pro main camera use?

The main camera has four physical stops, f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4.0, and Auto is the default. Apple also ships an API so third-party camera apps can drive the same iris instead of faking depth in software.

Do the ultra wide and telephoto lenses have variable aperture?

No. Only the 24mm Fusion Main camera has the six-blade iris. The 13mm ultra wide stays at f/2.2 and the 100mm tetraprism telephoto stays at f/2.8, including the 8x crop at 200mm.

What is Apple Reference Image on iPhone 18 Pro?

It is an opt-in mode that signs what the main sensor saw and stores an unalterable companion file next to the editable photo. Turn it on in Settings, Camera, Reference Image, Add Reference Mode; it runs on 1x and 2x and does not run on 0.5x, 4x, or 8x.

Can Photographic Styles 3 be applied to ProRAW files?

Styles attach to HEIF captures, which is why Mann shoots HEIF for everyday work. He still rolls ProRAW for stars and other low light when he wants to set grain and noise reduction himself later.

Does the iPhone 18 Pro front camera get the new Pro controls?

The 18MP Center Stage front camera gets shutter speed, white balance, and a histogram in Pro controls, but it has no variable aperture, so there is no f-stop slider on the selfie lens.