Is HMD reviving the camera-centric marketing from Nokia Lumia days?

Back in the Lumia days, when Nokia smartphones were the best camera phones on the market, Nokia Connects (a PR led community service) used to invite various photographers to demonstrate the power of Lumia cameras. One was Stephen Alvarez, a National Geographic photographer, who was showing the world what can Nokia Lumia 1020 camera do. He would take the influencers or Nokia ambassadors with them on a road trip and share his photography advice with the Nokia community. That was back in the days of Croatian Nokiamob, but history seems to be repeating once again. Dear buddy Jim of the Techbuzzireland, shared an interesting post by Irish HMD PR agency. They gave the Nokia 7 Plus to professional photographer Katrina Frazer, and she played with it and gave some interesting tip on how to take a better shot. She talked about low light photography, about its problems and how to overcome them.

Here are some of her tips on low light photography:

• It is always best to steady your hands when taking a picture so using a portable tripod will give you the best possible shot
• If you don’t have a tripod, try spreading your feet shoulder width apart and lean your back against a wall to create a tripod with your body
• If you have a desk/table/counter to lean on, plant both elbows on the platform – elbows should be wider than your shoulders.

She also said that the best way to take care of the shaky hands is to slowly breathe out before taking the shot. This really works!

Then she talked about ISO and explained how by manually controlling the aperture you can choose the exact distance your smartphone camera will focus on.
ISO simply refers to the cameras’ light sensitivity settings. By changing the ISO setting you change the size of the lens – a low ISO is like squinting your eyes, and a high ISO is opening them up wide.

For the perfect portrait or selfie that brings out the contours and shading of a face, it’s better to use a low ISO. To make the most of the detail this setting allows, you should ideally try to position the subject in natural light, with the light focused on their face. In these circumstances, LED flash will kill the image so try to use the light available along with adjusted ISO settings to create pro-portraits. So, on darker light, you should up your ISO. For close-up detail in the midday sun, lower it!

Aperture ranges from f1.2 to f22 – setting your aperture between f1.2 and f4 is ideal for capturing close details while f16 is great for getting your whole family in your perfect holiday sunset. This is hard to achieve since current Nokia lineup doesn’t have the possibility to change the aperture, but hey, maybe in the near future Nokia logo will be printed on a camera monster once again.

This is what she said about the Nokia 7 Plus:

“What makes the Nokia 7 plus stand out for me is just how simple it is to take a good picture. The amount of professional-level options available on a smartphone at this price is very impressive and the interface is uncomplicated and easy to understand. With just a basic understanding of the manual settings using the Pro Camera mode you can capture images which are true to life, and you can even edit and share your content without changing apps.

If you like to capture as many memories as possible on your smartphone you’ve probably run out of space on your phone many times! With the Nokia 7 plus you have free unlimited space on Google Photos so your pictures are stored safely in the cloud. Google Photos also has a really handy search feature so if you’re looking for that awesome sunset you captured on holiday all you have to do is type “sunset” into the search bar to find the photo you want.”

Here are some shots I took during the test of Nokia 7 Plus (Resolution reduced to save server space).

I don’t know if HMD is following the footsteps of Nokia Connects and trying to revive the photographers in Nokia fans around the world. Nokia 7 Plus is the first mass sold Nokia smartphone that has a rather good camera that is capable of taking great shots. With a touch of Snapseed, or even without it, some shots made by that phone look stunning. You can see that every day if you follow out Twitter where we are trying to promote that part of Nokia community. People are sharing wonderful shots and it is a shame that HMD misses the opportunity to market their phones as great camera phones which they could be, or already are. This PR action taken by HMD Ireland is a move in a good direction and I’m hoping to see similar actions around the world.

Via TechbuzzIreland