I took a few minifigures on vacation to make photos of them in real-world. I also took my old love. She is a bit worn of, heavily used and tired of life. The Nokia N8, which I'm talking about, is a 15 years old phone. I still love it. I love it's timeless optics from the professional lens manufacturer - Carl Zeiss.

I bought it around 2010/2011. Back then, it was a revolutionary smartphone. 12 MP camera, ReadyHD (1280x720) videos. But it was not about the numbers. The Zeiss optics were doing great job. And, in my opinion, they still do. The raw photos it produces have a really nice atmosphere and quality.

Unlike with modern smartphones, the photos aren't auto-retouched with a million filters and artificial smoothing and sharpening. They're exactly as the sensor captures them. They have a bit of grain. The colors aren't super saturated. But that's why they better reflect reality. This also allows for better editing in Photoshop.

So instead of carrying a professional (kinda heavy and big) camera I took my fifteen-year-old Nokia N8. It's really small (11.35 x 5.91 x 1.29 cm) and very light (135 g) compared not only to cameras but also to current phones.

Does it still take great photos? You can judge for yourself. I touched them up a bit in Photoshop, mainly changing the colors to less saturated ones to match the Lord of the Rings atmosphere. There are no major changes. My rules for photos has remained unchanged for years - do as much as possible in the lens and as little as possible on the computer.

P.S. An interesting fact: a very large portion of the posts from the early days of this blog were photographed with a Nokia N8. I even used it for commercial photoshoots years ago :) This device was truly ahead of its time.

It's a shame Nokia went bankrupt. They focused too much on hardware and not enough on UI and marketing. They waited too long to abandon their Symbian operating system (very cool, by the way). And after abandoning it, they went for Windows instead of Android... But that's a topic for another story. And probably another blog ;)

P.P.S. For a more atmospheric experience while viewing the photos, I recommend listening to a soundtrack from LOTR - e.g. this track.