Notices

In the camera application, you can choose between various pre-set modes, like "Auto", "Action", "Landscape" and "Portrait".

The question may be stupid but:

Am I right to assume that "Landscape" and "Portrait", in this case, have nothing to do with the device orientation, but do some other magic that's optimized for taking pictures of a pretty landscape or a person that's near to you, respectively?

The reason why I'm asking is that in the German UI, "Portrait" is translated as "Hochformat", which means portrait as in portrait format, not as in portrait of a person.

I was about to file a bug about this, just wanted to make sure I'll not make a fool of myself because it actually does mean portrait format.

That's certainly my understanding, yes.

And thank you for launching the "portrait as in face" phrase. "Free as in beer" was getting old.

Usually the difference is in the aperture you would select. Portraits are better with narrow DOF, while landscapes are often better with infinite DOF. At least that is how I believe P&S cameras behave.

Thank you for your confirmation.
Bug filed.
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6997

I seem recall that "hochformat" is the equavalent for "portait" in english cameras.

I'm not native german speker, learned it in school, so I did quick google search which gave german phography guide that used "hochformat" the same way english one would use portrait mode.

For example:
Wechsel zwischen Quer- und Hochformat: wechseln Sie die Haltung der Kamera. Je nachdem, was auf dem Bild dargestellt werden soll, eignet sich ein Hoch- bzw. Querformat mehr. Denn die Tiefe des Bildes wird durch die Breite (Querformat) bzw. die Höhe (Hochformat) zum Ausdruck gebracht.

The joys of translating.

There's two semantic concepts here... one is device orientation. Portrait (as opposed to landscape) orientation.
The other one - completely different - is
(citing wikipedia here in order to avoid "portrait as in face"-like constructs. ...)

In English, you use the word "portrait" for both.
In German, we don't. We say "Porträt" when we refer to the painting/photography/..., we say "Hochformat" when we refer to portrait orientation.

The German text you found gives the user hints on how to hold the camera for certain scenes. That's why they use "Hochformat". That's also why they use "Querformat", not "landschaft" (=landscape), btw.


Sorry for going so deep into this, but it's just the same kind of translation error that sometimes can be really funny. And Nokia seems to love them. See this post of mine for example about Nokia Ovi Store:

They used a wrong translation for "utilities" there... And again, it wasn't plain wrong wrong. It was wrong only in this context: One English word that covers different concepts, several possible German translations with very different meanings... And whatever robot does Nokia's translation likes choosing the wrong one.
(The thing with "Utilities" being translated as "Öffentliche Einrichtungen" (public organizations) in Ovi store was particularly funny because sometimes people refer to public toilets as "Öffentliche Einrichtungen". Language is a minefield. Believe me, I try to write English here ...)

Well, as long as Sun keeps translating (server) "State" with "US-Staat" and "Subjects" with "Betreffe" in their enterprise software, Nokia's translations cannot be too bad...

Alas, as we're talking about a fixed aperture lens, there is no changing of DOF Portrait can also mean a bunch of things in postprocessing - skin tones, colour saturation, sharpening, etc.

Reminds me of bug 3332. ("Speicherort" is "Location" as in "location where to save files", whereas "Standort" is "Location" as in "where you are right now").

... one of the bugs that were "FiF" - I think the fix was to no longer have this screen at all, right? Can't find it in any settings.