So by now we have seen how the Nokia Lumia 920 measures up against a SLR when it comes to landscape and High Definition Range (HDR) and also as a "point and shoot camera". But how does the Nokia Lumia 920 perform as a camera to capture food? As a lover of cooking and food I am a keen food photographer and have always used a SLR to capture these kind of shots. However, it is not always easy to carry a SLR around to restaurants or eateries. Most foodies or serious food bloggers will indeed use a SLR to capture their shots. This is because they want to capture the essence of a dish or ingredient and be artistic at the same time.
There are a couple of things needed to take good photographs of food:
1. The ability to get close to be able to capture enough detail to highlight the dish/food/ingredient.
2. An eye for detail and angle. What part of the dish is to be the star of the shot?
3. Depth of field.
4. Clarity, sharpness and correct colour output (blurry, discouloured pictures do not do justice to the dish/food/ingredient). The point of food photography is to entice the viewer to try the dish (eating or cooking it). This is clearly seen in most cooking magazines and cookbooks.
I have done some preliminary testing with the Nokia Lumia 920 to see if it can be used to photograph food. Below is an example (with more to come in future posts):
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Homemade Vietnamese spring rolls with Nuc Nam dipping sauce.
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The above shot was edited using the phone's autofix app. A vignette was also added using Thumba Photo Editor and the picture was cropped slightly. The shot is sharp, the colours are vibrant and the phone's F2.0 lens allows for a shallow depth of field showing enough detail to draw the viewer to the focus of the picture, the delicious, golden and crunchy spring roll.
The Nokia Lumia 920 therefore accomplished the mission of food photography = I want to eat the dish photographed!
More to come, stay tuned....
I am to very picky over my shots. I don't find that there is a compression issue with the images. The sizes are what you would expect from a camera on JPEG Fine values. My old D70 on JPEG FINE gives a 2.21 MB (7 MP) image the Nokia gives 2.9 MB image (8 MP).
ReplyDeleteThere is a white balance issue that occasionally happens, you will notice it on filming video and also with the flash used as fill. There is a new update for the phone that fixes it. Unfortunately WB correction on JPEG is horrible, I do wish that they out a RAW file like DNG. But that is wishful thinking.
All the soft issues on images are to do with post processing of what is captured from the sensor. Nokia is less aggressive than apple. This is exaggerated even more because the AF sensor isn't crash hot for the camera. Again, an update is coming to address this.