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We already know that Nokia Lumia 1020 takes great pictures when you’re out and about, but how does it perform in studio conditions?

Our own camera expert, Ari Partinen, together with colleague Marko Saari, organized a proper fashion studio photo shoot to find out.

The good thing about studio shoots in general is that the photographer can control the lights, background, everything, making it a lot easier to get a perfect shot than when in outdoor conditions for example. But the key is getting the lighting and exposure right.

In their studio shoot, Ari and Marko used soft box lights and external flashes to illuminate the subject (that is, the models) and manual settings on the Lumia 1020 (white balance set to daylight, ISO 100 and exposure time 1/200) to make sure the background was also correctly exposed.

setup

But the interesting part was how they used the built-in xenon flash on the Lumia 1020 to trigger the main flashes, to allow them to capture the movement we can see in the sample pictures (below).

Ari explains:

“The flash on the Lumia 1020 has two short pulses. So we used a small external flash as a medium to disable the first pre-flash pulse coming from the Lumia 1020, and then fired the main external flashes only on the second pulse. This made sure the main flashes were synchronized perfectly with the moment we pressed the shutter key on the Lumia 1020.”

“We could have just used bright lights to illuminate the subject and not challenge ourselves with the flash synchronization. But for us, it was important we could capture the movement in the pictures and you can only really do that with a xenon flash.”

Here are some sample pictures from their studio shoot – captured with the Lumia 1020:

Lydia_hair_467x701
Lydia_front_467x701
Natalie_b&w_467x701
Tiina_front_467x701
ari