You should always be wary of hyperbole and accolades but, surely, the revolutionary Nokia 808 Pureview is the greatest cameraphone ever made?

You can take stunning images straight out of the box and even when the phone is locked – a single long press of the camera key is all that’s required to capture a pin-sharp picture.

But suppose you are feeling a little more creative and want to see what the Nokia 808 PureView is capable of?

The shooting Modes

As you would expect of such an advanced cameraphone, the Nokia 808 PureView has several shooting modes. 

• Automatic: This is the default mode and is ideal for most conditions and purposes
• Scenes: Choose from a number of pre-defined scenes where the settings have been optimised. They include Landscape, Close-Up, Portrait, Sports, Night, Night portrait, Spotlight and Snow.
• Creative: This allows you the freedom to influence all the key parameters used in capturing great photos.

We’re going to take a look at the Creative mode in more detail because if you can master this, then you might find that you are taking better and more stylish photographs than ever before.

Exposure and white balance

To help you get the colours in your images as true and accurate as possible, Creative mode has several pre-defined settings for white balance.

The white balance settings you can choose from are Sunny, Automatic, Cloudy, Incandescent and Fluorescent.

Exposure relates to the amount of light that is captured in the process of taking a picture. Enthusiastic photographers will know that this can be manipulated to take some highly striking images. 

In Creative mode, you can see the exposure level before taking a picture with the help of the live histogram that becomes visible when you press the exposure icon on the left side of the screen.

For best results, it is recommended that photos are exposed to the brightest part of the image because blown out whites don’t look very good.

Where, there is a high contrast in one shot, for example part of the scene is very bright and part is very dark, it is also advisable to use the fill-in flash.

 You can lock the auto-exposure by half pressing the mechanical shutter key at the top of the phone.

Shooting in low light

ISO is a measure of a camera’s sensitivity to light. Generally, the higher the ISO the brighter the picture will appear under low-light conditions, for example at dusk.

You can set the ISO on automatic but Creative mode allows you to adjust the ISO to be anything between 50 and 1600.

In low-light conditions, you will get best results by shooting in PureView mode at 2/3, 5 or 8-megapixels. Allow exposure times of up to 2.7 seconds and set the ISO low (so, 50) for ‘noise’ free pictures.

It’s also recommended that you use a tripod for support or use Night mode in low-light conditions.

ND filter

Using the Neutral Density (ND) filter helps you to take photos with a motion blur effect. The ND filter can be enabled when your 808 PureView in is Creative mode. 

When the ND Filter is on and the ISO value is manually set at a low value (such as 50), the camera will use long exposure times (up to 2.7 seconds) – even in bright conditions.

 These settings should help you to capture images such as the one above of the rolling tides coming ashore.

Next week, in the second part of our tips and tricks for the Nokia 808 PureView, we will see how you can make the most of the zoom, close-up shots, shooting video and reveal how you can start taking pictures with something called the ‘Bokeh’ effect.