Tips and Guides On Nokia N97 Photography

Set aside those hundred-pages-book for your photography guides and tips because I will share to you a simple yet effective tips on capturing artistic and with expert styles photos from your Nokia phones. Never mind those tissues you will prepare because I’m sure there will be no NOSEBLEEDING that will happen here.

Be amaze with your phone’s half-hidden abilities. And for sure, your inhabited camera features on your phone will be unravel as we will go deeper on its sensor chips, urgh! I said no nosebleed. First and foremost I recommend to open your camera application now or start sliding the camera lens cover of your phones. Then we will now go the next brain-draining-steps of this article! Just kidding again! Hahah.


If you really like to capture great photos with those artistry you have learned for the past years, I’m sure you cannot complete it without any devices to use to showoff your abilities. If you are patient enough to follow this blog for the past weeks or months then you were able to saw some of the photos I’ve taken so far with Nokia N86, Nokia N97 Mini, Nokia N73 and now for my Nokia N97 Classic
. That’s not all I also have this 365 Photo Project for month of January and February.

Now let’s start to digest the few steps.

*This guide will be focusing on Macro/Close Up modes, Flash, and configuring the favorable and best suited camera settings.

Important matters to swallow, just like taking your bitter medicine tablets when you were a child.

• Always don’t depend on your Automatic mode of your camera settings if you will capture images on macro, portraits, landscape or anything that goes with arts.
• Be familiar with the basics of camera specs. I reserved some special link here to help you understand aperture, focal length, shutter speed, etc. from Symbian-Freak Forum by @lifenexus.
• Define your own personal Scene Modes. Tweak or Edit your own personal scene mode and don’t hesitate to try it now. Basing on my setup, I made it to Macro>Vivid>Cloudy>Medium ISO>Flash Off and the rest are normal. I made this because I am always taking small objects, our place is always cloudy, and I love taking nature’s finest living things.  Thanks to @Binku for helping me out about my previous post about  N86 and N97 camera comparison.
• Try all camera features and tweak all settings, it is like try & try until you find something nice. For example on the Nokia N86 8MP and its Sequence Mode shot is very useful when you want to compile photos for a time lapse video. And I had already made one while capturing the sunrise. This will apply also for grid, self-timer, etc.
• Flash and Exposure are the remedy for night shots but you need to setup the best configurations of these two. Vivid versus Normal and  we will tackle this with sample shots below on this article.
• Timings are mostly needed but for me you will need luck most.

And now let’s begin to masticate these samples I’ve got.

Flash and Exposure
Talking about flash here, and most phones have LED/DLED flash that are not bright as Xenon nor smarter than it except in video shoot. So use the flash wisely, put the exact distance from your phone to the subject. Sometimes it also depends on the subject if it can reflect or disperse the flash made.

Another useful feature is the Exposure and this will be better to configure if you don’t want to move your distance, like if you will use flash but you are near on the object then you can lower the exposure. If you lower the exposure for sure it will give you a darker photos as it will manipulate the light depending on your setup. The higher the exposure the higher the light will be expose.Take a look at these images taken with Nokia N97 Classic:

In contrast, more exposure more light so use the exposure level wisely. For the flash, just adjust your distance instead.

Automatic vs Cloudy

In the White Balance settings of your phone, you have there the Close Up, Automatic, Sunny etc. but here I will show you how useful a Cloudy mode is, taken by Nokia N97 Classic.

You could see that the Automatic mode gives a bluish photo while the cloudy mode gave a better color. But sometimes it really depends on your current location on how you manage the settings. *Note that Cloudy setup can give a higher temperature effects on photos when the scene is not suitable for the setup.

Vivid vs Normal

Shot by Nokia N86 8MP. Obviously the Vivid color tone will give a more aesthetic effects on the photo but this is not applicable always because during night time or in the dark area, vivid shots are very useful as it will give a more precise color. While on the Normal of the color tone, you will get more real colors during day time or with abundance of light. It only means that if the camera have good adjustments on the elements of the scenes it is better to stay on the Normal shots.

Sharpness and Contrast
This is my favorite tips for you, the sharpness and contrast usefulness. Who said these two features are useless? This tweaking will help you a lot to capture artistic photos. Even the objects you consider useless will be turn to glamorous one. Take a look at my shots witj N97 Classic.

Here’s another manipulation of Sharpness and Contrast. From trash to sash photos.

>>>

Shoot Like A Pro
These tips and guides are not enough so I recommend that you practice then make things perfect ;D. Just give a few couple of minutes of tweaking the settings in every scenes you will capture, I’m sure that you will be amazed how useful your camera settings are. The important thing is how you use or setup your camera settings beacause they were made for you to explore and not for you to stare only,  so, GoodLuck!

Here are the best macro shots I’d shot with a personalized setup…

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Tags: 5MP, Camera, camera features, Carl Zeiss, Guides and Tips, Nokia N86 8MP, Nokia N97 Classic, Nokia N97 Mini, Photography

This entry was posted on March 6, 2010 at 1:57 pm and is filed under How to-Guides, Mobile Technology, N series, Nokia N97s, Photo Project, Specials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.