Traveling with the Lumia 950 XL – Destiny: Tuscany

Rating: 5.00 based on 1 Rating
  By Diego Sanchez
Traveling with the Lumia 950 XL – Destiny: Tuscany www.sleeklens.com

Greetings dear lector, if you are reading this is because the title must have generated you some curiosity: traveling with a mobile phone? It is something that most of us do, whether it is for communicating, using the GPS or taking some other pictures.

So, in @Fotoensayo we have realized that travels are the best way to prove a mobile phone, in what photographic specs refers to, that is why we are permanently going from one side to another for testing the different terminals cameras.

Today, we will talk about the Lumia 950 XL. We do not make too much emphasis in the technical characteristics, as this is something that our friend Anes Mulalic has already explained very well in his article.

We will talk about the photographic experience while making a trip through the Italian Tuscany, only carrying with us this mobile phone.

Traveling with a mobile phone as the main camera, among professionals, it is not something new. Back in 2013 Jim Richardson, of National Geographic, made a trip to Scotia using only his iPhone 5s. We ourselves, have already had a couple of previous experiences with the LG G4 while traveling by Turin, developing one of the first published articles by a Spanish media (Viaje con Escalas) that contained photos made only by the mobile terminal.

This entire context supported us for repeating the experience with the Microsoft terminal that promised a lot because of its rumored specs. A 20 Mpx sensor, with a 3.340 mAh battery and a Snapdragon processor of 8 nucleuses, which gave us the idea that you could get a lot of profit of the Lumia 950 XL.

The first stop was in a town in the mountains called Barga, its little streets make it ideal for searching lines, little sun rays that enter among the ceilings generating high contrast, which was ideal for the type of street photography we wanted to do. So we could see the high dynamic range that this phone provided us respecting to the shadows and highlights information, but also the poor quality of its photographic editor.

The Nokia Creative Studio is maybe one of the few failures that we find in this terminal. It counts with some black and white and color filters that for the casual photographer may go well but for a professional photographer do not give enough autonomy.

Is the opposite case of the Nokia camera, its original camera application. That is without a doubt one of the best we have tested. The Interface is intuitive and allows you to control all the necessary aspects in its manual mode, so the photographer feels the fact that his camera behaves as he wishes.

After downloading Adobe Photoshop Mobile, as a desktop alternative for digital post-production, we continued our trip to Lucca. A walled city that provides a perfect environment for testing the phone’s presentations in conditions of high or low lights.

Continuing, the churches of medieval aspect show us little lamps and candle lights while in the streets of that zone, the intense heat of summer gave us spectrums with a lot of light which was a test that the phone overcame without difficulties. In terms of noise and high contrasts, this terminal is clearly superior to many of the high gamma models in the market.

Back to Barga, we had the opportunity to make a portrait series to Giulia Manfredini, Barga’s violinist. In occasions, as photographers, one only considers the ampliation capacity of the image produced by the mobile phone and not the detail level of it. And it is just in these portraits where you can better observe this element.

By using only the light provided by the windows, we find out that the results were good in terms of noise. The detail level, although it is not the best we have seen, it is not so bad either. We could say that of what we were expecting, the test was overcome.

Finally, we travel to Pisa one of the most visited cities in that area of Italy, thanks to its well-known inclined Tower. We took a walk through the city looking for shapes, high contrasts, and colors. This last one was one of the elements we were missing for fully evaluating the Lumia 950 XL.

If it’s well known that when making photos in DNG in this type of terminals, the tones tend to be a little saturated, which sometimes can chop off our chances of creating an interesting post-production work, our interest was precisely seeing the margin of edition this color give us. Another successfully passed test. Unlike other mobile phones of the competition, the 950 XL show us a high range of hues to edit, allowing us to saturate and modify the colors in a wide range.

So there, in the square full of persons making photos with their and supporting the inclined monument, finalize our trip. Despite some sporadic locks, present when we were editing for long periods of time, we returned very satisfied for the phones reached functions in terms of photography. Nevertheless now is your turn to try it out and give us your opinion, we will continue #fotoensayando.

Rating: 5.00 based on 1 Rating
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Diego Sanchez

Foto ensayo is the name given to the proyect of Diego Sanchez, a social communicator and journalist who was born in Marinilla (Colombia) in 1990. He started his career as a reporter and graphic editor in “Contexto newspaper” and as a freelance photographer in the development of documentary products. In 2013 he moved his residence to Seville, where studied travel journalism and started his collaboration with magazines like “Mas Viajes” from Spain and “NAO” from Mexico. In 2015 he started a new stage in Barcelona, where he was part of the documentary Cities for Life, it maked for What's Up Doc and he develop stories for magazines “Viaje con Escalas” and “Enfoque Visual”. During this time his photographs were exhibited in countries like Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. Also, he has the opportunity to be part of publishing projects as “La Ruta del Condor”, “Maguaré “ and “Los viajes de Sancho”.

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