HDR on the N8

I've been doing HDR on my Nokia camera phones for a few years now. I had figured out a method to do it on my N82 that involved using a bluetooth keyboard and a tripod. However, this was cumbersome and took minutes to bracket photos at different exposures. I can do this on my N8 a lot more easily now.

I recently purchased the HDR Photo Camera app from the Ovi Store. I love this app. It automatically brackets photos in seconds. It can also merge the photos, but that takes a long time and the result is only about 1 megapixel big. Thankfully, you can turn this feature off and just have the app bracket photos. The problem with this app is that it doesn't remember settings. If you forget to turn off the merge option, it takes a couple of minutes for it to process. Processing is very resource intensive, if there are too many apps in the background, the merge will fail. It does remember other settings such as exposure level or size. Unlike the built-in camera, the UI is nice and simple. An updated version is coming out soon.

I spent yesterday afternoon at Woodley Park and took a few photos. The first photo is from the built-in N8 camera. The next two were shot with HDR Photo Camera and tone mapped in Photomatix 4. I had fun shooting these photos and am looking forward to new opportunities to use this app.


N8 | This is a regular shot from the N8


N8 | This is an HDR version of the same scene.


N8 | This came from the same set of photos, but with different tone mapping