EMIRATES PALACE HOTEL (Lumia 1020 test #2)

Nokia Lumia 1020, test shot #2 This is my second Lumia 1020 'exhibit', as a part of a camera test I'm doing for Nokia. I took this frame on the beach of the Emirates Palace Hotel at the Blue Hour, my favourite time to shoot landscapes and architecture. As usual, I approached the shoot as I normally would with any professional DSLR camera. It starts by placing the camera on the tripod, framing the composition and waiting for the perfect light. I set the Lumia 1020 to capture 5 bracketed exposures from -2EV to +2EV. Lumia's 'Shutter Delay' option is really great as it allows you to capture the photograph with a 2 second delay so there's no possibility for a camera shake. I would wish for a remote shutter though and I hope that Nokia's engineers introduce it in near future as an optional accessory. This camera phone actually deserves one. Longest exposure you can take with Lumia 1020 is 4 seconds. That's pretty good for early evening and early morning scenes but not quite sufficient for dusk and dawn scenarios. Lumia's 1" sensor is very sensitive considering it's inside a smartphone...but not -that- sensitive. I'm pretty certain that future Lumia iterations will have a far better sensor and 4s limit will not longer apply, but for the time being, I needs to be dealt with. At ISO 100, I ended up with 4 exposures. 5th exposure, the darkest one, was beyond the 4 second limit so Lumia 1020 simply skipped it. 4 exposures were sufficient for this scene though, so I was able to do solid HDR tonemapping combined with Digital Blending. Final result is almost free of any noise or JPEG artifacts. There's no banding in the sky, despite the 8-bit per colour limitation of JPEG file format. I'm very happy with the end result.