The Difference Between Film and Digital Photography (Video)

Sally Wiener Grotta and her husband Daniel wrote some of the first books and articles about digital photography. Sally was an award-winning photographer in film days, and has maintained her reputation in the digital imaging age. In this interview, she talks about how to buy a digital camera -- including the radical idea that most people really don't need to spend more than $200 to take quality photos. (We had some bandwidth problems while doing this remote interview, but the sound is clear so we decided to run it "as is" rather than try to remake the video and lose the original's spontaneity.)

Comments

Re:Love camera phones

[smooth wombat]

At this point dSLRs should only be used by professionals,

Thank you for pointing out your beliefs that only certain people should be able to use certain products. I guess your opinion is also that only those who drive for a professional living should be allowed to buy a Porsche or those who make their living from cooking should be allowed to buy $300 knives.

Apparently it's your belief people shouldn't be allowed to buy what they want with their own money just because they enjoy a product.

A dSLR camera is useless if no one sees your photos.

Yup, there's the confirmation.,

Right tool for the job

[PeeAitchPee]

For 95% of what people take pictures of in the real world, yeah, a camera built into a smart phone is probably good enough. However, if you're shooting:

• * Stuff that moves fast
• * Stuff you want to print really, really big (over 4 feet across)
• * Stuff that needs to be color-accurate
• * Stuff where you want to control what part of the image is in focus

Then you need something like a DSLR with a real shutter & aperture and honkin' big sensor, and hopefully expensive lenses that can take advantage of all of the above. Spending $200 on a hands-on photography class will have much more impact for most people than spending the money on an expensive camera, and then hoping you getting better results when you push the button (which ain't happening).

Re:Love camera phones

[jedidiah]

What's obscene here is the idea that you have to buy a device with Facebook built into it in order to publish things via Facebook. One should be able to easily combine devices that conform to open standards to achieve things with technology the engineers never thought of.

Profanity is not an inappropriate response to proprietary walled garden nonsense.