Sunset with Nokia N8

Sunset - 014354 - Nokia N8, fixed lens Zeiss 6mm f/2.8, 1/100 f/2.8, ISO 132, handheld. Italy.

The progress of technology has greatly expanded the photographic capabilities of "mobile phones" (actually they can no longer be considered "phones": they are mini-computers!). Until 2010 year I had a Samsung M8910, while nowadays I use the Nokia N8, the best camera phone currently on the market.

Of course it would be great to have always the SLR camera with you, but nobody has always an heavy, large and expensive camera with him. Many times I have seen marvelous scenes while driving on the highway, during a walk with friends, from the bus or the plane...there are many situation when I don't have the 7D, and many times I have lost good occasions. For this reason, I have chosen to buy a phone with a good camera: or course it does not have the image quality of an APS-C or FF, but even a photo with so-so image quality is better than nothing! :-)

A couple of days ago I have seen a fabulous sunset: since I did not have the Canon 7D with me, I have taken some photos with the Nokia N8. Even at sunset, the brightness of the sky was enough to take photos at relatively low ISO (132). When you half-press the shutter button on the N8, you lock the focus and the exposure: a very simple way to change the exposure (without using the cumbersome exposure compensation of the phone) is to change the composition until you get the correct exposure, then half-press to lock exposure and take the photo with the desired composition.

Since the dynamic range of a camera phone is quite small, I have exposed on the sky while the window became a silhouette. During post processing, I have improved a bit the colors and the contrast (even though the JPEG file created by a camera phone does not give a lot of space for editing). With layer mask I have brightened up a little the right area of the window, to show a little more detail. I have cropped the photo to the classic 3:2 ratio, since I don't like the 4:3 ratio of camera phones and compact digicams. Overall, the image quality of the final image is pretty good: it would even be possible to print it 30x45 centimeters without problems.

Let's see a 100% crop to evaluate the image quality:

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