Recently I’ve been working on a pretty cool project with Huawei mobile phones. I was asked to take ski photos for them with their new mate 10 pro and write some tips on taking great ski photos with your mobile phone.
The mate 10 pro is a great phone, running on the android operating system and it has a dual lens camera built in partnership with Leica. One lens is 12mp and the other one has a 20mp monochrome sensor. The phone definitely feels like a premium product, is well built and has a very stylish design. It also has a dual sim card feature which is great for me as I often end up carrying around 2 phones for UK and French numbers.
I spent a couple of days getting used to the phone and then went out on a mission to take some ski photos. To try and get some great views we went up the Aiguille du midi in Chamonix to ski the valley blanched, and we weren’t disappointed. With some amazing weather and great snow I managed to get some great shots of Ryoko, Mattias and Sally and some of the AI effects built into the phone really made the views look stunning.
To get a bit of variety in the shots I decided to try a different resort that I’ve never skied in, but always wanted to see, so headed over to morzine to meet up with my friend Paul and a couple of his friends to see what was offer. If you haven’t been, morzine is part of the portes de soleil and has a huge amount of terrain with a lot of variety. We headed over to avoriaz to start the day, a lot of the area was really wind blown, but we managed to find a couple of patches of fresh powder and got some pretty good shots.
The burst mode on the phone is great for this kind of thing as it has a really fast rate so it makes it really easy to capture the action, although you do have press the shutter a couple of seconds early as there is a bit of lag before it gets going.
After a bit of lunch we headed to the park for some shots and then to the stash, which I had been told would be great for some shots. The stash turned out to be an awesome location with loads of great terrain and features built from trees in the forest. It was a little dark, but because the phone has the ability to shoot in raw its pretty easy to fix this later.
I would always recommend using raw to take mobile shots if possible as the quality of the photos you’ll get will be much better. You do need to spend a bit of time afterwards processing the images to get them looking really great but it’s well worth it for the results that you can achieve.
I’ve been pretty impressed with the camera on the phone, and the phone is really fast when using it day to day, it’s the first android phone I’ve had though, and I’m yet to decide whether it’s enough to tear me away from my iPhone.
