As part of Nicolettecinemagraphics we are constantly exploring new avenues of photography, videography, and digital access to information. As of January 2013, Matt Swift – freelancer for Nicolettecienmagraphics started a new blog http://glutenfreespouse.wordpress.com. This blog not only helps explore the search engine optimization qualities of WordPress but also provides a venue for disseminating gluten free information in Columbus, Ohio. The majority of the blog is set up to be primarily based on food photography, which helps us explore various lighting techniques and equipment, because you can never have too much practice with this sort of thing.
While working on this blog, we started using our new Nokia Lumia 920 cell phones to take some of the photos because of the ease of use for both taking the photograph and publishing it to the web. The big problem is, it is not always easy to pull out your nice gear and lights, so you need a camera that is functional quickly but can still provide a pretty good quality photograph. The Nokia Lumia 920 comes standard with an 8.7 megapixel Carl Zeiss f2.0 lens. The lens itself is very crisp, with a slightly wide angle but not so much that it distorts the horizon lines of your image. Also, the software that is native to the phone provides good functionality with controls for the following;
Scene type – Auto , Close-up, Night, Night Portrait, Sports, and Backlight
ISO – Auto, 100, 200, 400, and 800
Exposure Value – +2 through -2 at 1/3 intervals
White balance – Auto, Cloudy, Daylight, Fluorescent, and Incandescent
Aspect Ratio – 16:9 or 4:3
Focus Assist Light – On or Off
All of these features are really great. Depending on the scene I am shooting I can adjust the ISO, white balance, and scene type to take a pretty decent picture. Even thought by default the camera itself and the software control is pretty good, I still find that I need to do just a little post editing to achieve the type of photo I want to put on the website most of the time. The Nokia Lumia 920 is a Windows phone and, unfortunately, Adobe has not released a mobile Photoshop App for Windows yet. So, I downloaded the free Nokia Creative Studio App.
Nokia’s Creative Studio App is easy to use and comes with several addition features that let you perfect your photo. When you open the app it provides you with a handful of options for editing your photo;
Overall Color Edit – Silver, Ivory, Seashell, Quartz, Original, Jade, Aquamarine, Amber, and Opal
Blur – Focus Object or Radial + Tilt Shift
Play – Color Pop or Collage
Adjust – Color balance, Brightness, Clarity, Vibrance
Fix – Crop + Rotate and Red Eye
All of these features will let you change the temperature of the color of the photograph; change the focus; make a single color pop out and the rest of the photo black and white; and much, much more. While using this app the other day for photographs of a gluten free meal for the blog I was able to take a photo, I thought was already pretty good, and turn it into amazing (for a cell phone picture). All I did was change the focus, the color, and the contrast. Suddenly I could better control the viewer’s gaze, make certain colors more appealing and create a high contrast image so that the food really jumps right off the page at you.
My Nokia camera is so good I am now using it for video art pieces that are being displayed in galleries on a 42inch TV. You really can’t ask for much more out of a cell phone camera.