There’s always a buzz in the air at Nokia’s launch events, but perhaps none more so than a few weeks ago when we officially unveiled the Nokia Lumia 1020 in New York.

Of course, in the preceding months, there had been plenty of anticipation and speculation that Nokia was going to reveal something very, very special.

All the same, even though most people were ‘expecting’ to see a new Lumia smartphone with a 41-megapixel camera, the event still managed to impart a sense of wonder and awe.

This was achieved, in no small part, by the fantastic onstage demos that were used to illustrate the Lumia 1020’s unique and novel imaging capabilities.

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, was joined onstage by Juha Alakarhu, Nokia’s head of imaging technology and Kristina Björknäs, Nokia’s imaging marketing manager.

Video Zooming into bees

In the first demo, Kristina shows a video that she had recorded of her bees with a Lumia 1020 using the lossless, high-resolution zoom. Watch the clip from the launch event.

Xenon Flash comparison

Stephen Elop shows off three different photos that he took in dark conditions using the flash on two competitor devices, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5, and the Xenon flash on the Lumia 1020. Watch the video clip.

Dual-Capture & Re-framing

Juha zooms in with his Lumia 1020 to capture a photo of Stephen. After the photo is taken, he shows how you can zoom out again to show Kristina also in the picture. Not just that, Juha then reframes the image to show a secret message from Kristina. All that from taking just one picture! Watch the video clip.

Needle in a haystack

We posted Kristina’s amazing ‘needle in the haystack’ photo but here you can also watch how this was demonstrated, to great applause, at the Lumia 1020 launch. Watch the video clip.

Pro Camera

With the help of some flowers, Juha and Kristina demonstrate how you can easily control the camera settings with the Pro Camera user interface. Check out how the manual focus is shifted from the tiny toy figure in the flowers to Stephen Elop in the distance. Watch the video clip.

Light painting

Using Pro Camera’s manual exposure settings, Stephen takes a still image of Juha and Kristina ‘painting’ with light trails. What have they created? Watch the video clip.