It feels good to see Nokia putting effort into making 808 PureView owners realise its imaging potential. Earlier we saw Video Tips series from Nokia. Now on Nokia conversations there is an excellent article by “Boc”. It covers Shooting modes, Exposure & White Balance, Low-light shooting and ND filter. Writer has also shared his experience in imaging here, and trust us it is really useful.
The shooting Modes:
- Automatic: This is the default mode and is ideal for most conditions and purposes
- Scenes: Choose from a number of pre-defined scenes where the settings have been optimised. They include Landscape, Close-Up, Portrait, Sports, Night, Night portrait, Spotlight and Snow.
- Creative: This allows you the freedom to influence all the key parameters used in capturing great photos.
Exposure and white balance:
To help you get the colours in your images as true and accurate as possible, Creative mode has several pre-defined settings for white balance. The white balance settings you can choose from are Sunny, Automatic, Cloudy, Incandescent and Fluorescent. Exposure relates to the amount of light that is captured in the process of taking a picture. Enthusiastic photographers will know that this can be manipulated to take some highly striking images. In Creative mode, you can see the exposure level before taking a picture with the help of the live histogram that becomes visible when you press the exposure icon on the left side of the screen.
- For best results, it is recommended that photos are exposed to the brightest part of the image because blown out whites don’t look very good.
- Where, there is a high contrast in one shot, for example part of the scene is very bright and part is very dark, it is also advisable to use the fill-in flash.
- You can lock the auto-exposure by half pressing the mechanical shutter key at the top of the phone.
Low-light image captutre :
ISO is a measure of a camera’s sensitivity to light. Generally, the higher the ISO the brighter the picture will appear under low-light conditions,
- You can set the ISO on automatic but Creative mode allows you to adjust the ISO to be anything between 50 and 1600.
- In low-light conditions, you will get best results by shooting in PureView mode at 2/3, 5 or 8-megapixels. Allow exposure times of up to 2.7 seconds and set the ISO low (so, 50) for ‘noise’ free pictures.
- It’s also recommended that you use a tripod for support or use Night mode in low-light conditions.
ND filter:
- Using the Neutral Density (ND) filter helps you to take photos with a motion blur effect. The ND filter can be enabled when your 808 PureView in is Creative mode. These settings should help you to capture images such as the one above of the rolling tides coming ashore.
When the ND Filter is on and the ISO value is manually set at a low value (such as 50), the camera will use long exposure times (up to 2.7 seconds) – even in bright conditions.
