Change the way you see the world - review P9 leica camera

Mid last month, Huawei sent me their soon to be launched smartphone P9, co engineered with Leica camera to test as a fashion blogger. Yes, this phone has an inbuilt Leica camera! If you are a photographer, you would have jumped in your seat reading this. Leica is the most prestigious photography brand across the world, with over 100 years of legacy.

The camera comes with dual lens technology with12 megapixel sensors with an equivalent 27mm lens, accompanied by f/2.2 maximum aperture lenses. The front-facing camera is 8 megapixels and an aperture of f/2.4.One of the cameras has a color RGB sensor, while the other is monochrome only with the intention of capturing more light, and therefore better images. How it works is, both rear cameras clicks at the same time, with one taking a color image and the other taking black-and-white images. Because it has no color filters, the monochrome sensor is able to absorb twice as much light and provides useful contrast that is integrated into the composite 12-megapixel image extremely sharp and noise-free images.

There is a pro mode, with a good degree of manual control, allows you to set ISO (50 to 3200), shutter speed (1/4000th sec to 30 sec), exposure compensation, autofocus (AF-S, AF-C or MF), white balance, and metering patterns. It lets you shoot in the raw DNG format so you have the flexibility of editing shots in Photoshop. The auto mode allows you to recreate the look of using a DSLR or the bokeh effect – to create shallow depth of field effects. The other inbuilt modes are Monochrome, High Dynamic Range (HDR), Night Shot, Light Painting, Time Lapse, and Slow-Motion. You can also change various settings of resolution (12mp, 9mp, or 6mp) and aspect ratio (16:9, 4:3, or 1:1).

Being a fashion blogger and fashion enthusiastic, fashion week is the best time to test a smartphone’s camera. Attending fashion week means taking pictures during the show, clicking pictures of interesting street style, snapping own outfit posts. To get quality images to put up on website one either has to carry a professional camera and have some decent photography skills or hire a photographer or beg photographer friends at the fashion week to take pictures and hope they send it to you.

The best camera is the one you have with you all the time these days i.e. your smartphone camera! Thankfully, the P9 is definitely set to revolutionizing mobile photography. This fashion week I took all the pictures be it my outfit posts or favorite styles potting on the P9 camera. All the images were clicked on auto mode and have not been edited. . Using the dual cameras to capture wide aperture and add depth to images, I could easily blur out the noise in background of most pictures I took by selecting wherever I wanted to focus in the image and rest got blurred.

Usually the terrace at fashion week is where most street styles or outfit post are clicked. This is the only place with natural light as lighting inside the hotel is not the best for non SLR images. This year, due to the rains in Mumbai the terrace was covered, so there was hardly good lighting. The dual lens captures good images in the low light, while in good light, detail is very well resolved and colors are nicely saturated.

Here are some of street style of my favorite fashion men I clicked on the P9 with no edits.