GLOBAL – What do Kim Kardashian, Kelly Brook, Kate Middleton, Prince William, Prince Harry and The Queen have in common with the Nokia 808 PureView?
Yes, they are all SEO gold. But that’s not why the intro is written that way, honest! No, the answer is that all of these subjects have been photographed by Ian Jones – who sent us a pic of the Queen taken today on his N8, below.
The content of his pictures alone tells you that Ian is at the top of his game, and a cursory glance at his website will confirm it. Nobody gets that kind of access unless they are a premier division photographer.
Add to that the former Daily Telegraph staff photographer’s reportage portfolio in Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s hard to find a more complete snapper anywhere. If you asked him to photograph tumbleweed, he’d come up with a potential award winner!
Before I met him in Barcelona, it was uppermost in my mind to ask him what he thought of the new Nokia 808 PureView.
And, when I entered his makeshift studio in a box-like single room at the secret location close to the MWC 2012 site, it was obviously the first thing on his mind too.
I’d barely introduced myself and he asked me, like a kid who’d just won a ‘supermarket sweep’ of the world’s biggest toy shop: “Have you seen the 808? It’s amazing.
“Look at how quick it is.” Ian demonstrated by taking a picture of me, from a standing start, going straight to the camera function on the 808 PureView.
“And look at the detail in that. I could use this to do a picture shoot for a magazine.”
Not particularly happy with the rough-looking person on the screen (it was tough out there), I couldn’t help being impressed by the warts-pores-11 o’clock-shadow-and-all definition in his portrait of me.
“Er, Ian, you realise that’s a prototype 808,” I reminded him. “Sadly we won’t be able to use that picture.”
As Ian got to work with his portable light tent, flanked by automatic flashes triggered by his Canon DSLR, I was struck by his no-nonsense approach.
Other photographers of his calibre might have spent ten minutes moaning about the unsuitably small size of his hotel room and demanded an upgrade to a suite.
Not Ian, he just got on with photographing the entire range of handsets that were released in Barcelona, against a very tight deadline.
I left him to it and met up later in the lobby to get a disk with all his pictures so that we could publish them on Conversations.
Ian couldn’t stop talking about the 808. “I have an N8, because it has the best camera I’ve tried on a phone. I don’t even need a compact camera as a back-up. You could do a whole shoot on the N8, it’s that good.
“But the new 808 is so much better, it’s a real leap forward in quality. It’s hard to believe that they’ve managed to do it.”
At that stage, it was all so new that we didn’t really know how the 41-megapixel camera phone produced such amazing 5-megapixel shots using oversampling. We were both just stunned by the magic of it.
When I did ask him about the technical side, I got a very refreshing answer.
“I’m not really interested in all that,” he said. “I just want to know if a camera can take good pictures.
“A great picture has little to do with the spec. It’s all about capturing a moment.
“If someone tells me there’s a new camera that’s better than the one I have, I want it. But I almost don’t have to know about the science behind it.
“I can’t wait to own one of these 808s.”
For now, Ian has shared some other pics taken with his N8, apart from the second pic from the top, taken today at London’s Westminster Abbey during the annual Commonwealth Observance ceremony. But his favourite is the shot of the cavalry honour guard that greeted Her Majesty the Queen’s royal visit to Oman on a five-day tour of the Gulf region in November 2010.
“That shot has everything: Great definition, colour saturation and sharpness,” he said.
So Ian has agreed that, when we get a full production version of the Nokia 808 PureView, he will put it through its paces.
And I can’t think of anyone better qualified to do it.
