Bobbruch1@AOL.COM on thu 25 mar 04
Since this was a discussion in the clayart room, I am forwarding a portion of
an article on new digital cameras.
Pro-Style Digital Cameras, Now Priced for Shutterbugs
By DAVID POGUE
Published: March 25, 2004
ILLIONS of people buy digital cameras every year, delighted by the
advantages. No cost for film or processing, ever. A screen that displays each picture
before you take it and lets you delete bad shots before your public catches on.
The freedom to use the results as desktop pictures, on a Web page, in e-mail
and in an infinite variety of other ways.
Most people are only vaguely aware, though, that inexpensive consumer
digicams are little more than Fisher-Price replicas of professional equipment. When
you see a digital photo in a newspaper or magazine you can bet that it was
taken with something called a digital S.L.R. (S.L.R. stands for single-lens
reflex. Translation: When you look through the viewfinder, you're actually peering
out through the lens. What you see is what you'll shoot.)
A digital S.L.R. excels in situations where consumer digicams hastily excuse
themselves and leave the room. For example, in portraits and close-ups, the
subject can be sharp while the background is softly out of focus. (The typical
consumer digicam comes with a permanent wide-angle lens that keeps both
foreground and background in focus.) And while even inexpensive digicams may offer a
Sports setting that freezes fast action, a digital S.L.R. offers a Burst mode
that keeps snapping as long as you squeeze the shutter, several shots per
second, greatly improving the odds that one of them will be decent.
A digital S.L.R. can also accommodate dozens of professional interchangeable
flash attachments and lenses - telephoto, wide-angle, macro and so on - which
means that it presents no limits to your growth as a photographer (nor to your
expenditures on your hobby). It's also loaded with controls and manual
overrides that are familiar to experienced photographers (aperture, shutter speed,
exposure compensation, ISO adjustment) to handle a far greater spectrum of
lighting situations and subjects.
Now, you may be perfectly content with a much less expensive, much more
compact consumer camera. There is, however, a certain population that craves the
superior quality and flexibility of a digital S.L.R. but has been kept away from
those joys by the prices.
Only four years ago, a six-megapixel digital S.L.R. made a $25,000 dent in
your life savings. But last fall the air was filled with the sounds of Visa
cards being slapped onto shop counters after Canon introduced the first digital
S.L.R. for $1,000: the EOS 300D Digital Rebel. Next month it will be joined by a
second $1,000 model, Nikon's new D70. (Canon includes the lens for that
price; Nikon does not. More on this in a moment.)
These are precision machines that, even in Auto mode, will reward the
photographer, skilled or unskilled, with huge, crisp, brilliant, joyous photos.
They're six-megapixel cameras (6.3 megapixels on the Canon, 6.1 on the Nikon),
which gives you two kinds of flexibility. First, you can make poster-size prints
at high resolution. Second, you can crop out extraneous background, a technique
that almost always makes a photo more powerful - and still retain enough
resolution for a nice big print. Just remember to buy a memory card big enough to
hold these larger photo files, and prepare for the longer transfer time to
your Mac or PC.
These semipro cameras wipe out three of the most common complaints about
consumer digicams. First, battery life: each camera houses a big rechargeable
battery whose life you measure in days of shooting, not hours. You can easily take
1,000 pictures before you need a recharge. The Nikon can also accommodate
disposable CR2 batteries, which you can buy in some drugstores in a pinch.
Second, these cameras can throttle back the built-in flash automatically to
avoid making your subjects look like they've been living underground.
Third, a digital S.L.R. wipes the floor with ordinary digicams when it comes
to speed. Because its autofocus is much faster that what you get on a consumer
camera, shutter lag - that annoying delay (on consumer models) between the
press of your finger and the snapping of the shot - is a thing of the past. You
even get something called continuous autofocus, in which the camera constantly
adjusts in real time as your subject moves, so everything will be ready when
you mash the shutter.
Timothy Sullivan on sun 28 mar 04
I saw the note on Digital SLRs and wanted to say that I have been
extremely happy with my Canon Digital Rebel for use in portfolio shots. I
was very frustrated when I was using professional photographers and even
more frustrated by trying to shoot my own 35mm slides.
For me the 3 greatest benefits of digital are the following:
Much faster - no film developing - no trips to the processing facility -
no reshooting and I find out quickly whether I got what I wanted and
adjust accordingly
Ready for the web - no scanning of slides
More understandable process - I'm not a photographer and having the blind
process of shooting 35mm and then getting it developed and then reviewing
the results (and reshooting etc.) was a difficult one for me - Each
digital shot has the aperture and shutter speed (and lots of other info)
annotated with the file and makes it easy to understand how to use these
settings to improve image quality
I would also highly recommend www.colorslide.com for processing - fast and
high quality slides. George is very helpful and easy to deal with.
Hope this helps people trying to decide whether to go digital.
Timothy Sullivan
Creekside Pottery
Marietta, GA
www.creeksidepottery.net
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