Cameras

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Category: Kyle's Articles
Published on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 22:41
Written by Kyle Wilson
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A friend of mine is looking into getting a better camera soon.  I thought I'd try to write up what I know in as short a form as I can to (perhaps) help out...the following is the current form of that...

 

If I were just starting out trying to take 'pretty' pictures (pretty much anything beyond family snapshots) I'd probably go for the EOS Rebel T3 here. I would also make sure I got a good, waterproof camera bag with enough room for various supplies and at least one more lens (even though you're likely to start out with just the kit lens).

Important to keep in mind that any crud that gets inside the camera when the lens is off can very rapidly make a beautiful piece of picture taking equipment into a piece of junk. Unlike film cameras (where runied film can be chucked and replaced by good film at any time) a digital SLR has a huge IC chip in the back that captures the picture. Any contamination or damage to this chip will directly show up on the picture as dots, smudges or blotches (depending on how badly you muck it up). For a beginner who only has the kit lens, this probably isn't a big deal as long as you make a point of keeping that lens attached at all times. Never leave the camera for any period of time without either the lens or the cap that comes with the camera covering the opening on the front of the camera body. The same sort of care needs to be taken with respect to water...having some place to put the camera that is water-safe should a rain shower catch you unawares while out taking pics can save your camera.

Some of the things that you'll want from an SLR that a lower end point and shoot camera won't provide:

  • Raw mode shooting This gives you greater color sensitivity in the stored image. You'll have to convert it to a more standard format before you send the shot around or have it printed. It makes it possible to save shots that turned out too dark or light by adjusting this conversion in the softwre. With the standard *.jpg format what you see is pretty much what you get and if you lighten or darken the image substantially you'll see the loss of quality much faster. I seldom shoot anything but raw mode as I virtually always want to be able to bring the picture up on the big monitor at home and adjust the brightness of some or all parts of the picture.
  • Tv - shutter time control There are times when you want to control how long the shutter is open. This can involve forcing it the time to be short to avoid motion blur in low light while accepting a grainier image or a darker image. It may be keeping the shutter open longer to cause motion blur in the shot as a special effect. Pretty much any SLR will allow you to control this and while you won't use it every shot, when you need it you'll get shots you couldn't otherwise have considered. This lets you decide how much motion blur you want in a shot.  You can force the lens to stay open when there's lots of light to make moving things blur a bit or force the shutter to open and close quickly even though the picture will come out a bit darker and/or grainier than you might like to avoid having moving things smear out in lower lighting conditions.
  • Av - Aperture control The size of the opening that the lens uses to let light through controls the depth of field for your picture. Smaller apertures allow items at a wider range of distances in sharper focus. Larger apertures allow you to get crisp detail on your target while blurring out the background details (called 'bokeh'). Small cameras inherently have small sensors and lenses and thus tend to be unable to generate this background blur effect.
  • ISO - Sensor sensitivity The higher you set the sensitivity of the sensor, the grainier your picture will be. The trade-off is that a more sensitive sensor will create a brighter picture with a given amount of light. Being able to choose this setting lets you trade picture grain (noise) against motion blur in dimmer light.

If I have more time soon I may add some more detail to the lower end cameras below...

Of the cameras below, the SLRs all have pretty similar features. The higher end cameras do more and do it better (more sensitive to light, more focus points, better speed) but largely have the same kind of abilities. At the lower end (one-shots) you lose 'raw' mode except for the top of the line G12. Lower down you lose the ability to control the shutter speed, aperture and sensitivity. If you want to control how your pictures come out and make the trade-offs necessary to get decent shots under challenging conditions you will eventually miss these.

  • EOS Rebel T3 Red 18-55mm IS II Lens Kit 549.99 ($454.95 at Amazon)

    This is what I'd recommend as a first SLR camera (perhaps as a first 'serious' camera). I'm on the Canon side of the fence (I know that Nikon has some great equipment too, but I don't know enough about their gear to talk about it). Reasonably priced and well regarded and pretty capable. If you get one of these and learn enough about taking pictures to find it limiting, that's the time to step up to something bigger (imho).

    This camera doesn't have a whole lot of pixels, but the ones it have should perform far better than anything in a little one-shot camera. It appears to have most or all of the manual control features that you'd expect from an SLR and for getting started with serious amateur shooting this seems like a pretty good choice.

  • EOS 7D EF-S 18-135mm IS Lens Kit $1,999.00 ($1,728.95 at Amazon)

    This is my current camera and the kit lens I bought it with (though primarily as a 'walk around' lens to supplement my existing lens selection. This is the second SLR I've owned and I'm very happy with its performance. It is almost certainly too much camera to start out learning on (never mind that at the price you're going to be seriously unhappy if anything happens to one of these). This is probably about the highest end camera I'll ever own unless I start making significant money selling pictures...and there's no great likelihood of that any time soon.

  • EOS 60D EF-S 18-135mm IS Lens Kit $1,399.00 ($1079.00 at Amazon)

    This is the lineal descendant of my first SLR camera (an EOS 40D with the 28-135mm kit lens). It was a wonderful camera, and in most cases met all of my needs...the 7D is nicer, but it was a 'splurge' not really something I felt was necessary to take the shots I wanted to take.

  • EOS 5D Mark II EF 24-105mm IS Lens Kit $3,199.00 ($2,919.00 at Amazon)

    And here is the camera that I'd probably buy if I won the lottery (hard as I don't buy tickets) or wound up with options in a big IPO (yeah right). This is the low end of Canon's 'full frame' line and more camera than I'll really ever need...this camera also only accepts 'EF' lenses (the EF-S lenses are designed for the smaller sensor SLRs and the mirror would hit the back end of the lens in this camera) and to make reasonable use of one of these you should have higher end lenses in your kit than I currently do.

  • PowerShot G12 - High-End, Advanced Digital Cameras (379.95 at Amazon)

    This is the top end of Canon's non-SLR range. Seems to do much of what an SLR can do (and at nearly the same price) but you won't be able to get better optics than what comes as part of the camera. I suspect that at the moment a low end SLR is a better choice than one of these (though one of these might make a good backup camera) unless you plan on sticking to the 'kit' lens on the SLR forever (and if you enjoy photography, lens envy will hit you pretty fast once you see what other lenses can do).

  • PowerShot S100 - High-End, Advanced Digital Cameras ($429.00 from Amazon)
  • PowerShot SX40 HS - High-End, Advanced Digital Cameras
  • PowerShot SX230 HS - High-End, Advanced Digital Cameras

These are all lower end (but still pretty capable) point and shoot cameras.  They offer substantially less manual control than those above, but should take decent pictures without much manual intervention.

I also forgot to mention lenses.  Most SLR cameras can be bought with a 'kit' lens.  If you're buying your first camera you almost certainly want to buy that kit as a camera without a lens isn't of much use and the kit lenses are reasonable for most purposes and should serve until you understand what your more specialized needs might be.

Canon lenses are tagged as either EF or EF-S.  The only difference here is that only the EF lenses can be used on high end ($2500+ camera body) camera models that have full 35mm sized sensors (and thus also larger mirrors).  Canon adds an 'IS' to lenses that have stabilization built in (this helps to keep things from getting blurry when light is low and the camera needs to keep the shutter open for longer periods of time).

Focal length (which is specified in millimeters) mostly tells you how wide or zoomy a view the lens gives you.  Smaller numbers correspond to wider angles while large numbers zoom in on your subject.  For most entry level to mid-range SLR cameras today a focal length of about 35mm corresponds to the field of view of the human eye (or at least so I've read).  Down to 18mm or less gives you a pretty wide view of the landscape while up at 300mm you get a small telescope effect :)

I normally carry three lenses in my camera bag.  My most common lens is the 18-135mm lens listed below which gives me a pretty broad range of possibilities and is good for most shots.  I also carry a 70-300mm stabilized zoom lens for longer shots or close-ups of things that I can't get close up to.  My most recent acquisition is a 10-22mm ultra-wide lens (a bit of a splurge here) that lets you get huge swaths of the landscape in the frame or allows you to get very close to something big and still get a decent shot.

Canon SLRs (which are the only line I know much about) seem to have several kit lens combinations for their entry level Rebel series...

EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens

This seems to be the 'default' kit lens.  I've got one (it was a cheap way to get a relatively wide angle lens when I bought it and was my 'walking around' lens for quite a while.  They're cheap, stabilized (and you definitely want this) but they have little zoom capability.

EF-S 18-135mm IS f/3.5-5.6 Standard Zoom Lens

I bought one of these with my EOS-7D as my new 'walking around' lens.  It is wide enough at the '18' end and zoomy enough at the '135' end to handle most casual shot snapping.  Picture quality seems pretty good and the image stabilizer seems very good.  If you're just starting out, I'd strongly urge you to consider this (if you have the budget it may push you towards the Rebel T3i rather than the Rebel T3 as the T3 doesn't seem to offer a kit with this lens.

EF-S 55-250mm f/4.0-5.6 IS Telephoto Zoom Lens

This seems to be offered as a telephoto zoom extra to some lens kits that also contain the 18-55 lens.  This probably isn't a terrible combination, but unlike the 18-135 lens you'll have to swap lenses to get to even moderate zoom levels and when you swap lenses you always have the possibility of getting crud on the sensor.  I may be a bit extra paranoid about this, but it is worth keeping in mind.

EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens

This also seems to get added into some lens kits.  I'd avoid it if at all possible.  It isn't a stabilized lens (and for this sort of zoom you want all of the shake resistance you can get) and it is a pretty low end zoom lens.  I've got the EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM in my camera bag, and I think it is worth the extra cash.  I'd go with the 18-135 lens at the start and then if I find myself with the spare cash and a need to longer zooms (and when you're comfortable that you can switch lenses quickly and cleanly) look into the stabilized telephoto zoom (EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM).