Juha Alakarhu is Nokia’s head of imaging technology. Along with colleague Eero Salmelin, he invented the 41-megapixel sensor technology that lies at the heart of the amazing new Nokia Lumia 1020.

In this series, we take a walk together through a gallery of sample pictures and video taken with our new superphone and Juha discusses how the different components of the camera on the Lumia 1020 can each contribute to taking great pictures.

Please click through on the pictures to see the full image. 

Juha says:

A key difference between taking photos on a smartphone compared to an SLR is that, on a smartphone there’s a tendency for the devices to put everything in focus. That’s not a bad thing, but people often wonder why photos taken with professional camera equipment have that added sparkle.

It’s difficult to create photos with sharp foreground and a softer background, or the other way around. In SLR images, bokeh or the use of a shallow depth of field, is a key way to make images unique and to tell stories and extract your subject out of the background.

The Lumia 1020 gives this back. The large image sensor allows for a natural shallow depth of field. The camera also offers the option for manual focus (from 15cm to infinity), which is especially useful for close-up or macro shots. One further option is in the latest version of the Creative Studio app, which allows you to create bokeh effects in post-processing.

The end results are photos with a razor sharp focus area, but a softer focus on the periphery that makes the main focus object or area stand out so much they sparkle.

Tomorrow, in the third part of this series, we’ll be looking at how manual control of the shutter speed can help create some amazing photographs.