Low light Shots of a Church Nokia 808 & 920

So the buzz phone of the moment is the Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset and it's 'floating' camera that enables exceptionally good low light photos. I also have the Nokia 808 PureView with it's 41 megapixel camera and a wide range of settings ( which as a photographic dunce I cannot take full advantage of) so I decided to do a few low light comparison shots and mess about with the settings on both phones to see what effect I got. Steve Litchfield recently did a couple of pieces on the All About Sites showing the effect of changing the ISO settings on a camera using some photos from Siraj Hassan Mohideen , here & here , and so I thought I'd have a go and produce a short piece showing the results when I tried it.

I took screen shots of the photo details of each shot I took so people have an idea of the changes and also tried adjusting the shutter settings a couple of times, you can see from the results, it's not a good idea if you don't either have extremely steady hands or a tripod handy, but changing the ISO does have a good effect. The 920 once again is much simpler to use than the 808 for a quick snap, but my favourite shot was actually produced by the 808 in creative mode 8 megapixel pureview with the ISO set to 200. And although more detail came out with the 920, the colour in the 808 photos look more natural to me.

What's the point of this post ? Well it isn't to show one camera is better than another, they're different, I think what it does show, is that both can produce pretty good photographs in bad lighting conditions, and that for someone in a rush the 920 will do the job with the least hassle or skill .

Hope it's of some interest and thanks for reading

Stepehen Quin

18/11/2012