Since we’ve been back in the UK, a pretty ubiquitous telly advert has really been grinding Prawns For Breakfasts’ gears. If you live in this country you will know immediately what we’re on about if we tell you it’s for the new Nokia Lumia 630 smartphone. It features a posho airhead inspecting fashionable accessories at an achingly trendy pitch, in what is no doubt meant to represent London’s Portobello Market. Yup, that one.
“Honestly, my style matters to me”, the vacuous fashionista intones in an accent that manages to combine the most irritating phonic tics of the whole cast of Made in Chelsea. She goes on to explain that with her new device, she can get “loads of stuff done”, which we assume basically means being able to use a spiffy new app to transfer thousands of pounds of daddy’s hedge fund profits into her own account with one click.
Ramping the irritability factor up 1000%, the plummy voiced princess goes on to explain that a desirable feature of the smartphone is its “Quad Core Processahh” which means, er, “it’s really fast”. Because you see, she’s a young modern woman, so naturally she doesn’t understand anything that’s not pink or glittery.
And of course, as she’s a clumsy-thumbed technoplod, our silver-spooned go-getter relishes the phone’s massive screen, which means that “even my photos look good”. Of course they do, love. Now do watch out for your little friend coming up behind you, she looks like she might be about to apply one of those to die for Dorothy-from-Wizard-of-Oz heels to your pretty little head.
But what upsets Jovian most about this whole, unpleasantly scripted (probably by a man), incompetently directed, utterly risible sales pitch is that he was suckered him into buying one of these rubbish phones himself, shortly before leaving for LA. And yes, when the spotty oik who sold him a Nokia Lumia 720 (why are the model numbers going down not up?) spun him the same yarn that a bigger screen = better photos, he believed him and his talk of technical wizardry. Fabulous yah!
We haven’t road-tested the Nokia Lumia 630 for the sake of impartiality, and we’re really not inclined to bother. It does, in fairness, have four times as many mega-pixels as its forebear. But let us tell you, the 720 takes really, really bad photos. It has limited depth, poor light reading, takes whole minutes of our poor subjects’ lives to focus, and mostly delivers washed out, grainy, flat shots. When you need to use the flash (as you often do during dinner), the results are even worse. It is, simply, a rubbish device for food photography, as the following images amply illustrate.
So this post is by way of apology to all our loyal PFB readers, who have had to endure such classic shots as Mole Negro (or a heap of undetermined dark matter encircling a white blob), Typical Guatemalan breakfast (or some dismembered shoe heels partnered by a fake plastic vomit), Octopus with rice (or chimpanzee brains and a tennis ball) and Churasco sandwich (or that scene from Gremlins where they all start decomposing into a putrid green puddle).
And this is where you come in. In a week we’ll be posting our final round-up of our trip, and handing out highly coveted ‘Golden Prawns’ to our best and worst rides and bites in the last ten months. For the special Readers’ Award category of ‘Unappetising Food Photography’, we’d like you to cast your discerning eye over the crimi-pics below, and vote for the very worst example. Then we’ll publish the results, send them on to Nokia and demand that they explain how their product helps food-bloggers “get stuff done”. Yeah, that’ll stick it to the man.
Vote now!
Please note: Voting closes on Sunday 27 July 2014.
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