One dismal, dreich Tuesday night after work myself and some other extremely brave bloggers headed to Shoreditch (in some cases sans umbrella) for a Street Art photography tour. The fabulous guys at Microsoft had arranged for us all to be loaned a Lumia 930 device with which to capture amazing pictures of the area.

After admiring the Lumia’s bright orange casing, testing out the selfie camera and catching up with some bloggers I hadn’t seen in a while it was time to set off on our little wander. You may remember that I took a graffiti tour of Shoreditch last year and it was interesting to see what had changed over the course of the last 18 months and more importantly what had stayed intact. We were guided through the streets by Karim of StreetArtLondon.co.uk while at the same time being given photography tips from Phil Hibberd.

I had intended to take pictures with both the Lumia and my own iPhone 6 as a comparison but the rain got the better of me and I stuck with the single device. Although I did capture one of the first pieces we saw with both devices. Can you tell the difference?

The top picture was taken with the Lumia and the colours are so much more vivid than the iPhone picture. This is probably because the Lumia  is one of the only smartphones out there that you can actually change the white balance on at the touch of a button which makes taking pictures in any environment so much easier.

Karim’s enthusiasm for street art was very apparent and he showed us many pieces that I hadn’t seen on my previous tour. Art of this kind is very fleeting as it can be painted over at any time and only those artists who are well-known within the scene command the respect for their pieces to be left untouched. I was sad to see that octo-elephant by La Pandilla had been painted over. Although it was replaced with an equally beautiful piece of art.

We stopped for a much-needed break at Pizza East where we had the chance to relax and chat with good food and wine (there’ll be a separate post up about that later because the pizza was EPIC!) before heading back into the night to see how the phones cameras coped in the night.

This is where those photography tips from Phil really came into their own and made the subjects of our photos stand out so much better than if we just used the regular settings on the phone. Tired and a little bit wet we said our goodbyes and headed our separate ways. Huge thanks to Karim and Phil for their time!