You may not have a telephoto lens, but you can still take great sports photography with your iPhone — it’s all about knowing the right tricks.

In addition to skating with Boston, I coach a couple of roller derby teams. One of the most important tools for me, as a coach, has become my iPhone: Taking video of practices and drills; breaking down skater stance in photographs; making notes for future strategy adjustments.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time using my iPhone as a sports camera, and I’m repeatedly surprised at just how well it does. Here are some of the tips I use to make sure I get good photos and videos of practices and games; whether you’re shooting roller skating or another sport, hopefully they can help you out, too.

Lighting, lighting, lighting

By and large, most sports move at a fast pace; in camera terms, fast movement requires lots of light so that your camera can use a fast shutter speed to snap a focused frame. If you have too little light, your image will be all blur and no action. The Camera app automatically sets your shutter speed, but you can also cheat a bit by using an app like Manual to boost your shutter speed up to 1/2000 and your ISO (which boosts light at the expense of picture noise and grain) up to 1500.

The best solution, however, is to make sure whatever you’re shooting offers you enough light to properly capture the scene you want.

Follow the action with your camera

By panning your camera along with the action, you not only have a better chance of framing your subject properly — you can often get spectacular pictures highlighting your subject with the rest of the scene in blur.

This type of shot is called pan-motion photography: In traditional DSLR shooting, you’d want to manually slow your shutter speed anywhere from 1/60 – 1/200, but your iPhone actually has software built-in to try and grab the best clear shot during a pan, especially if you’re shooting in a burst.

Use burst mode for fast action

Speaking of bursts, I use them almost exclusively when shooting iPhone sports photography: It allows you to take a lot of photos in quick succession and get a better shot when attempting pan-motion. The behind-the-scenes software also intentionally puts together the best, clearest shots, so you have a higher likelihood of getting a crisp, well-lit photograph.

Bursts also give you more freedom to frame your photo. After all, do you really want to stress over taking one perfect shot and accidentally crop off the player’s head in the process?

Use equipment to frame your scene

If you’re trying to take an overview photograph to properly represent your sport, dimensionality is key — if there’s a lot of motion on the track or field or rink, and it’s all in the background, it’s hard to draw focus properly to what you want represented.

In contrast, try using a foreground object to frame the background action. For example, in the shot above, I used a stationary roller skate to frame the drill going on in the background; you can also use things like balls, nets, gear bags, equipment, and the like to give overall context and dimensionality to your scene.

Close-ups are rare, but possible

The iPhone’s real weakness when compared to a DSLR is its fixed lens: Most fantastic sports photos are taken from hundreds of feet away and crop the scene to a specific action. Similar close-ups with an iPhone are much more difficult, even with an external lens kit, so you have to get creative if you want to get in the action.

When shooting derby, I’ll try and get closeups by skating along the inside track or skating in front of a pack during a drill; similarly, to shoot other games, try snapping photos courtside, or getting pictures of athletes before they go on their playing surface or after they’ve just come off. You can also, of course, mount your iPhone to a player (with their permission) and shoot from the sidelines with a Bluetooth remote.

Use slo-mo to heighten movement

If it’s video you want to capture, the iPhone has a leg up on all but the fancier DSLR video cameras: its slo-mo mode, easy portability, and auto-stabilization give you a lot of great tools for taking good sports video. The same caveats with photo-taking apply — you’ll want to follow the scene with your camera, and the lack of a zoom lens means that you have to be closer to the action than a traditional DSLR photographer — but shoot well, and you’ll get something worth bragging about.

A video posted by Ren Caldwell (@settern) on Mar 3, 2015 at 9:25am PST

Some tips for slow-motion videography: If you’re shooting in lower light, you can drop the framerate to 120FPS from 240FPS on an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus; this will brighten up your image without too much of a slow-motion sacrifice.

Once you shoot the video, too, you’ll want to adjust the slow-motion area to highlight movement appropriately; when you open the Photos app and tap on a slow-motion clip, there’s a draggable timeline that lets you adjust both the length of the video (the black and white handlebars) and the speed of the video (the blue hash marks and black lines). If you tap and hold on one of the black speed bars, your clip’s timeline will zoom inward, allowing you to have more precise control over when the slow-motion movement starts and stops.

Your tips?

Have you shot any iPhone sports photography before? Have any tips that worked really well or suggestions for things to avoid? Let us know in the comments. (And feel free to share your best iPhone sports photo!)

Have a BlackBerry Passport on TELUS? If so, you’re waiting for BlackBerry 10.3.1 is now over. According to several folks in the CrackBerry Forums (and confirmed via Sachesi) the Canadian carrier has now started their roll out of BlackBerry 10.3.1 to BlackBerry Passport owners.

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Pebble Time is the most funded project in Kickstarter history, and still has plenty of time to go.

Just last week, Pebble Time — the follow-up to the popular Pebble and Pebble Steel — took Kickstarter by storm. After blowing past their initial $500,000 goal, the campaign is now well over $13 million and still going strong. An additional boost has come from today’s announcement of the Pebble Time Steel, a luxury version of the new smartwatch. The combined effort has pushed Pebble Time over the top, making it the most funded project in Kickstarter history.

Pebble Time builds upon what made the original Pebble great, adding in redesigned hardware, a “smartstrap” for third-party connectivity, a color display, and a new version of Pebble OS.

Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky had this to say:

We have so much gratitude for our community and the herculean support they’ve shown us — from the first Pebble Kickstarter campaign to today. We’re inspired by the backers who believe in us, and our goal is to continue making them happy with amazing smartwatches that simplify our daily life and help us accomplish more. It’s been an unbelievable ride, and there are still 24 days left!

Pebble Time will be shipping in May and is available in black, white and red. Pebble Time Steel will hit the mail in July and is offered in gold, silver, and black. Various backing tiers are still available for both devices.

If you haven’t yet checked out Pebble Time, you can get in on the action via Kickstarter. There are still a few weeks to go, but don’t think it over for too long.

AT&T has announced that their Modio iPad case will be available later in March starting at $49.99.

First introduced during CES 2015, the AT&T Modio case will be available starting March 20 for all three versions of the iPad mini. The case acts as an LTE hotspot for your iPad, and is available either at its full price or on a plan, according to AT&T:

Connect your iPad mini with Wi-Fi to AT&T’s 4G LTE network and protect your tablet at the same time. The Modio case can be purchased for $49.99 with a two-year commitment, roughly the same price you would pay for a case just to protect your iPad mini. It’s also available on an AT&T Tablet Installment plan for $10 per month for 20 months, or at no annual commitment for $199.99. Add the case to a new or existing Mobile Share Value® plan for a $10 per month access charge.

The case comes with a 4,600mAh battery for up to 16 hours of continuous use. Additionally, the case contains a microSD card slot, allowing you to add up to 32GB of storage space for documents, movies, and more, accessible on your iPad using AT&T’s Modio Data app. A version of the Modio for the iPad Air and iPad Air 2 will be available later in 2015.

Source: AT&T

PCalc for Mac has been updated to version 4.2, expanding the utility of the app’s Notification Center widget by adding an advanced layout. intro

PCalc‘s widget gets a big update in version 4.2. More of the functionality of the main application has been moved over, with a scientific mode now available right in the widget. A grid icon will be available to the left of the widget, that you can click to expand or retract, depending on the mode you’re currently using. You can send the widget’s current calculation to the app by clicking the application button above the grid.

In addition to all of this new functionality, the PCalc widget now has keyboard shortcut support. You can use your keyboard shortcuts for all operations in the widget, and it will actually tell you if it has keyboard focus. This includes shortcuts like copy and paste.

PCalc 4.2 also contains a number of fixes for the main app as well. You can download the update from the Mac App Store right now.

• $9.99 – Download Now

The secret is out. Actually, the secret has been out for a while now but a lot of folks simply chose to ignore it. BlackBerry CEO John Chen is determined to make software a business for BlackBerry and along with that he wants to make sure that everything BlackBerry does is agnostic as well.

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For those of you who use the Xbox One SmartGlass app for Windows Phone,  or who like sending music and videos through WhatsApp, you will want to peep updates for both of those apps going live today.

The newly announced Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL smartphones from Microsoft are now available for pre-order at Amazon’s German and Spanish websites. Neither site has posted word on when the devices will ship.