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Ask Slashdot: Best Camera For Getting Into Photography?
An anonymous reader writes "I've managed to go my entire adult life without owning an actual camera. I've owned photosensors that were shoehorned into various other gadgets, but I've gotten to the point where the images produced by my smartphone aren't cutting it. My question: what camera would you recommend for getting into basic photography? I don't mean that in the sense of photography as a hobby or a profession, but simply as a method for taking images — of friends, family, and projects — that actually look good. That's a subjective question, I know, but I suspect many of you have a strong grasp of price versus performance. For example, when I'm picking a new video card, it's easy to figure out which cards are the best deals for a given price point — then I just have to pick a price I'm comfortable with. I figure a decent camera will run me a few hundred dollars, which is fine. But I don't have the expertise to know at what point spending more money isn't going to do me, as a camera newbie, any good. Any thoughts?"
The Canon or Nikon entry level DSLRs...you can't go wrong, except for the fact they are made for really small hands seemingly. For a little more money, get the next step up from either of those brands so you get a camera body that actually fits average human hand sizes.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/25/engadgets-holiday-gift-guide-2011-digital-cameras/
If you just want to snap pics, go for the lumix. If you want low light photography, I'd go for the s100.
A good cell phone camera... honestly. The best camera you can learn with is one that you will always have on your person. The latest cell phone cameras can make some really beautiful images: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/06/time-and-space/
When you are ready to go beyond framing and composition, then step up to a basic SLR like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D40.
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Canon Ixus (or PowerShot SD in the US) is a really easy and good snapshot camera. Cheap, too. If you point it at things and click, you'll get decent photos most of the time. They're also easy to carry everywhere.
That's the right sort of camera to learn composition and take pictures of everything and see what you can do with it and so forth on. Once you're sick of its limitations, go to a DSLR. Do not start on a DSLR, it's what you get second.
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is the one that you carry with you.
for a photography newbie, i'm of the opinion that the specific camera doesn't really matter. They're all more or less the same anyway. what's most important is finding one that you'll want to carry around with you and use. the more you use it the less newb you'll become over time. you'll learn things and by the time you're ready to upgrade you'll know what to look for.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Other than the quality of the sensor and the photographer, there are two things that contribute to a photo looking "good": lens diameter (collects more light) and number of lens elements (fewer is better). Going from a pinhole-sized smartphone lens to just about anything else is going to be a major improvement. Personally, I use a Canon DSLR (mostly because I like Canon, and it fit all of the lenses from the 35mm system it replaced), but I also carry a Panasonic Lumix "super zoom" point/shoot. It takes great photos (and video), and still fits in a pocket (it was better than the point/shoot Canons of the time). Their micro-4/3 systems with interchangeable lenses are also good. These systems (I've also heard good things about Sony's) offer a pretty nice quality/price balance between traditional point/shoot cameras and DSLRs, too. But as others have said, you should probably bulk up on your photo knowledge, too. Understanding stuff like shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, rule of thirds, etc. can go a long way to making better photos, even with a smartphone camera.
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It's a newer camera, great mix of features (including 1080P video and GPS geo-tagging). As a professional photographer, I'm a Canon fan-boy. (Nikon is good too.)
DP Review is a great geek-compatible site for camera reviews, here's their take:
http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canons100/
If you want good pictures of children. It is really only one thing that is important and that is the delay from pressing the button to taking the picture.
I got a D40 from Nikon just when they released it four years ago and have gotten tons of great pictures with it.
It has a rather small sensor and not that many functions, but the shutter delay is measured in milliseconds.
Those recommending otherwise aren't thinking this through. You've gone your entire adult life without a camera. You're used to your camera substitutes fitting in your pocket and that's how you should start with a real camera. The idea otherwise, that you will be instantly alright with carrying a DSLR is folly. You don't have the habits for a DSLR, you won't feel right, etc. My point is, you won't use it. It'll sit on a shelf. Sure as hell it'll take great photos the day or two you mess around with it, but after that, shelf time. I've seen it too many times before.
Start small. Grab a good point-and-shoot. I recommend a Panasonic Lumix with a wide-angle lens, high optical zoom and GPS. In particular, the DMC-ZS10. I'll admit I don't personally own one, but a friend of mine just picked one up and I've been amazed by what he's been able to pull off with it. That's the way to go. If not that camera, one like it. Something that will fit in your pocket - so you can make a habit of having it with you.
Then after a couple years after you've become used to a camera as a separate object, and have experience with having an actual camera, you'll have both the habits and the knowledge required to choose something better, whether that is another point-and-shoot or a good DSLR.
That's a mantra that people keep trotting out... but when I went from point'n'click to an entry level SLR the difference in picture quality was huge. A great photographer can take great pictures with any camera. A poor photographer won't take better pictures with £5000 worth of equipment than they do with £500 worth. But for a beginner photographer, the difference between a camera phone and a reasonable camera is astounding.
On the plus side, it is asserted that "The secret to good photography is lots and lots of bad photography" and digital shooting has made lots and lots and lots of bad photography cost virtually nothing...
I'm surprised that this question came up on Slashdot, but I regularly see and answer this question in other photography communities.
Use these two links to determine which camera to buy:
Snapsort
DPReview
There are a few things you need to decide:
My question: what camera would you recommend for getting into basic photography? I don't mean that in the sense of photography as a hobby or a profession, but simply as a method for taking images — of friends, family, and projects — that actually look good. That's a subjective question, I know . . . I figure a decent camera will run me a few hundred dollars, which is fine.
(emphasis mine)
You state that you don't want to get into photography as a hobby or profession, but you just want to take good family portraits? Good portrait photography is not really that subjective and is a combination of good lighting, subject isolation, and timing (for non-posed shots). A camera is just a tool, you have to gain some basic mastery of the tool in order to use it well. Dropping a few hundred dollars on a camera and leaving it in Auto / Program mode will not get you the photographs you're looking for.
Without more information, these are the suggestions I'd offer:
Non-DSLR, non-superzoom route:
- Canon S100 or S95
- Panasonic LX-5 or LX-3
Canon if you want more zoom range, Panasonic if you want better low light capabilities.
DSLR route:
- used Canon Ti1 or Ti2
- used Nikon D90
Pick up a 50mm f1/.8 when you feel limited with the kit lens.
And these people need significantly different kinds of cameras.
People from the first group want fast shooting, small cameras with minimal fuss. 99% of these people buy point-and-shoot cameras. They might or might not be technical people. They will probably get their pictures developed at the drug store or just post them to their favorite web site. Red-eye reduction is more important to them than long zoom or the ability to manually do much of anything.
The second group want a zoom lens longer than the longest you have on hand. They want to take a picture of the nose hairs on Mount Rushmore and they want to count the feathers on baby bald eagles. They have plenty of time to get their pictures "just right" and they will pay more for professional grade media. 99% of these people buy DSLRs (or the closest things we had to them back then). You can sell a tripod to these people but they don't really care about facial recognition or red eye reduction because they aren't looking to take pictures of their best friends since they already know what they look like. These people are not necessarily anti-social they just see photography as being about remembering things more so than events.
So my advice is first figure out which group you fall into. Then you can quickly rule out a good chunk of the cameras on the market. And don't let someone tell you there is one camera that does both well, because that is a lie. There are small cameras with good zoom but they are nowhere near being equals to DSLRs, and no DSLR is ever going to fit into your pocket.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm amazed that noone has suggested this yet.
Get a Canon PowerShot. For one thing, they're great little cameras (I started out with one), but that's besides the point. We're on Slashdot here, after all.
The point is that you can make it a lot better with a firmware hack called CHDK. It is loaded into RAM from the memory card without touching your original firmware, and gives you full manual control over your camera.
In addition to getting features normally only seen on DSLRs (such as bracketing, saving in RAW, and a live histogram), you can write and run Lua and uBASIC scripts on the camera, allowing you to program it to do whatever you want (such as motion detection to trigger photo or video capture, sophisticated timelapse scripts, intervalometers, USB remote triggering, etc.). You can take exposures far longer than the factory limit (mine went from a max of 15" to 64 seconds with CHDK), or far shorter in fact, allowing you to take both very low-light or very high-speed photographs that were simply impossible with the camera as it came out of the factory.
You can even play games on the thing. It's ridiculous.
If you can really say no to all that on a simple compact, you can buy me a DSLR and I'll give you your geek card back.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
I picked up a Lumix LX5 a few months back, I was basically looking for the best compact camera I could find. I've been very happy with it, it has a large sensor (1/1.63") for a compact, a decently wide angle (24mm equivalent), and bright F2.0 aperture. Full manual/shutter/aperture controls. Can even get some nice depth-of-field effects (ie, "bokeh"), something I've never really seen in a compact before.
I'm a firm believer in "the best camera is the one you have with you", this is what drove my purchase, as I'm not really interested in carrying around lenses. The LX5 takes great quality shots (including in poor lighting, I've even compared it head-to-head against some friends' DSLRs), and has all the manual options you could want to experiment with.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Photography's all about capturing light. The less of it you have, the longer you need to spend capturing it. This leads to blurry images as most things move and your hands will shake too.
You can partially solve this by:
Using more natural light - Shooting outdoors in daylight (can lead to harsh shadows and doesn't really work for your stated goal of shooting friends and family who tend to gather indoors for things like parties)
Supplying more light - using a flash (with the risk of redeye). Redeye is caused by light bouncing off the back of the eye on to the sensor. The closer the flash is to the sensor, the smaller the angles involved and the worse this problem gets. A flash hotshoe lets you move the flash away from the sensor. Also, external flashes tend to be angleable so you can bounce the light off ceilings and walls to get a smoother fill.
Reducing movement - You can put your camera on a tripod but it's a pain to carry around and a lot of compacts don't have mounts. You can also ask your subject to hold the pose but this annoys friends and most people other than trained models can't really do it. You also lose all action/candid shots.
Using a larger sensor - A larger sensor gives you a larger area to collect light.
Giving the light a larger hole to come through - Apperture. The problem is, the wider your apperture, the shorter your depth of field. A lot of compacts abuse apperture to make up for their small sensors but you end up with horribly shallow depths of field.
Amplify the signal - Rather than collect more light, you can amplify what you do get (higher sensitivy - ISO). The problem with this is photons hit relatively randomly with densities based on the light of the image. In large enough numbers (usually due to time), they average out and you get a nice smooth image. In small numbers, they're broadly but not exactly distributed based on the image you expect to capture. Amplify this noisy image and you get a lot of noise in the end result.
A DSLR solves most of these issues by giving you a much larger sensor than compacts use, uses higher quality components like microlenses, has much larger glass for collecting the image, provides a mount point for a better flash and gives you the ability to fine tune everything to get the right combination of tradeoffs for the shot you want. They also tend to come with much better autofocuses so you get the shot you wanted rather than wait for the focus to hunt and give you the shot a second after the action. For that reason, most people will suggest DSLRs - your odds of getting the shots you want are dramatically improved.
However - The best camera you can ever own is the one you have with you. If a DSLR is large enough that you never have it at parties, too expensive to risk at the beach, don't leave in the trunk of the car when out for road trips, it's completely useless except for the couple of times a year you plan a staged shoot.
Many of us with DSLRs realise and accept this so we see it for the tool it is, accept it may get damaged but a damaged and used camera is worth far more than an undamaged and unused one so we get a decent bag, toss it in the trunk, accept the weight of lugging it and all the glass everywhere and always have it with us. If you're like most normal people however, and won't do the above, a DSLR's a very expensive paperweight that's kept safely at home. Keep all of the information from the start of this post in mind and then find the compact with the fewest tradeoffs that's still small enough you'll have it everywhere (smaller size usually means more tradeoffs).
That might mean one of those credit card style totally flat cameras with a folding optic that goes everywhere. That might mean a basic compact with a zoom that comes out of the body. That may mean a larger compact with a larger fixed zoom. Or it may mean a DSLR. The point is, not knowing you and knowing what you will or won't put up with carrying, none of us can tell you what the right camera is for you. The best we can do is give you pointers to what will minimize your frustrations with a camera (namely ability to capture in non ideal light) and then leave you to decide what balance of size vs. tradeoffs is right for you.
And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
Sorry, but utter BS.
I was once part of a photography club. The members would regularly have internal competitions. The winning entries were more often than not from high quality non-DSLRs. The photographers had years of experience, owned DSLRs, but ultimately found smaller cameras to be more convenient.
Technical aspects (camera features, optics, etc) do help, but they are merely one reason among many that you get good photos. Other factors are opportunity, photographer skill, and yes, the number of photos you take.
As someone once said:
Most of Ansel Adams's photos were crap. I know that because most of all photographers' photos are crap - you just see the good ones.
If you're buying a camera that will reduce the likelihood of you taking photos, then you're likely going to get fewer good photos than with an inferior camera with which you take a lot more photos.
To get to the rest of your comment:
The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better.
Many non-DSLR's offer raw. This isn't 2001.
At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a .tiff or .raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed .jpg format which is usually just as good as a .tiff.
First, almost all good point and shoots offer TIFF. When I bought my first digital point and shoot in 2001, all the "good" cameras offered uncompressed TIFFs.
But that's all irrelevent because: A TIFF format is almost useless. You simply have a huge file with no lossy compression. This does not give you the extra manipulation headroom that you get with RAW. The benefits of RAW do not carry over to TIFFs.
These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw.
Not true. Uncompressed TIFFs have less information than RAW.
Seriously, how did this comment get moderated up?
Beetle B.