But as with many mobile phone cameras, you’ll notice that there’s a tonne of different menus and settings to look through and figure out. With that in mind, here’s a short guide on how to get the most from your Lumia 930 camera.
LUMIA CAMERA INTERFACE
The Nokia Camera app offers a fairly simple interface with some neat touches that make it really simple to use. First up, we’ll take a look at the standard buttons you’ll see when you open up the Nokia Camera app:
The Nokia Camera app has a rather unique way of allowing you to adjust white balance, focus, sensitivity, shutter speed and brightness. To access this menu, you just need to swipe the shutter button to the left, and it will expand to fill the screen with a series of slide controls which let you quickly alter any of the above settings. The controls are mostly see-through, so you can see the adjustments on the photo as you’re making them.
As you can see, when you swipe across the shutter button, you get a series of sliders across the screen, and you can quickly adjust any of the settings by sliding the button up or down.
CAMERA MODES
The Nokia Camera app on the Lumia 930 comes with a few different modes depending on what you need to do with the camera at the time. The main modes are Photo, Video and Smart Sequence, and there are also other modes you can access through the settings menu.
This is your basic mode for taking still images. All you need to do is point and click the shutter button, and the photo is snapped. With the 930 you can easily adjust any of the photo settings by using the sliders as described above. The PureView Camera means that when you take a picture, the phone actually takes two photos – one is a 5-megapixel picture, which is small and easy to share on social media sites, while the second is a larger, much more detailed photo (16MP default, or you can switch to 19MP; more on this later).
In order to see the larger photos, you have to open them with the Nokia Camera app. This is easy to do, as when you’re browsing through your snaps you’ll see a button at the bottom with Nokia Camera. Doing this allows you to see more detail and zoom in on the photos. You can also reframe the photo, by zooming in on a particular part of the picture and cutting it away as its own photo. Reframing works so well because the picture is very large to begin with, so you can crop the picture without losing a large amount of detail.
Video on the Lumia 930 is very simple, with just a button to start recording and a button to turn on the flash. You can go into the menu and adjust some settings such as the resolution to record at (by default it will be 1080p HD video) and adjust audio filters. The audio options are quite unique in that they can help filter out low frequencies such as engine noise, or you can record in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.
Smart Sequence
Smart Sequence offers a range of funky and interesting effects you can apply to your photos in order to add a bit more life to them. When you switch to Smart Sequence, rather than just snapping away, you actually hold down the shutter for a few seconds and the camera takes a number of photos in quick succession.
You can then use this sequence of shots to create some rather cool photos. One example is that if you took a Smart Sequence on a moving subject, you can overlay the photos to give the effect of movement in a still photo. You can also pick and choose which photo you like the best, and because you have multiple copies of it, you can crop out someone who might have stepped into the photo at the last minute – so you can wave goodbye to photobombs!
Lenses are a feature that was brought into Windows Phone 8 and allows you to integrate apps with the camera. For example, you can download camera apps and these will appear as extensions of the Nokia Camera, allowing you to quickly switch from the camera to one of those services. To access Lenses:
Front Facing
This mode is quite self explanatory – it’s simply used for taking selfies. There are not many options available in the mode, the only setting being to switch from a 4:3 to a 16:9 aspect ratio, or adding a framing grid. You can also add a timer if you want, so the camera will count down before taking the shot, which can be a bit less awkward than trying to press the camera button while trying to pose! To access the front facing camera:
GENERAL TIPS
So now you know the basics, but what about the extra features? The Nokia Camera app is nice and easy with its on-screen buttons, but it does have a lot of hidden extras too. Let’s take a look through these now.
I mentioned a little bit about this earlier, but let’s go into a bit more detail now. Reframe refers to a feature of Nokia PureView cameras that allows you to zoom into and crop out a portion of a photo, in order to create a new picture. For example, if you take a picture of three people, you could go back and crop out each of them into their own portrait.
The great thing about the PureView cameras is that because it has a large megapixel count (20MP on the 930), it means you can crop bits out of the picture and still have a high resolution picture. This can offer some great shots, as you may go back to a photo and notice something you didn’t see before.
Reframing a photo is really easy. You simply need to tap either reframe or open with Nokia Camera (depending if you’re in your photo gallery or in the Nokia Camera app) when you’re looking at a photo. This will then show you the photo with a grid laid on top of it, and you’re free to zoom in, rotate and focus on whichever bit of the photo you want, and then save a copy of this new picture.
Windows Phones have almost always had a dedicated camera shutter button that allow you to use the phone in a similar manner to how you would use a normal camera. The button on the side of the 930 is two-stage, so you push it down half way to focus on yor subject, then continue pushing all the way down to take the picture.
The shutter button also allows you to quickly open the camera from any screen, even when the phone is locked. To do this just press and hold on the camera button for about 3-4 seconds and you will be taken to the camera, which means if you want to quickly snap something you don’t have to fully unlock the phone.
Use a Framing grid
Enabling the grid on a camera is a useful way to help with the composition of your photos as you can line things up. There are many theories as to what sort of grid works best, so Nokia cater to all by giving you a choice of different ones to choose from.
Living Images is a new addition to the 930, and in some ways resembles HTC’s Zoe feature, wherein the phone will capture a few seconds of video footage slightly before you press the shutter button all the way down to capture the image. What you end up with is a rather cool effect where when you look through the pictures in your gallery the pictures come to life for a few seconds before flashing up the final captured still image.
20 megapixel Lumia 930 bracketing HDRBracketing takes a series of pictures at different exposures, and you can then choose which you like best!
Bracketing is a feature that attempts to take photos in the best exposure. When you use bracketing, the phone will take either three or five pictures after you press the shutter button, at low, normal and high exposure. All three of these are saved so you can go through and decide which you think looks best, then simply delete the others.
Change photo size and Capture mode
As I mentioned before, the Lumia 930 will save two photos when you take a picture, a smaller and larger copy. There are two main settings to look at – the aspect ratio and the Capture mode. The aspect ratio has two options – 16:9 which will save widesceen photos, and 4:3 which will save more square photos. Within each aspect ratio you then can choose what capture mode to have: