Any camera Gurus?

[miswuevos]

Hello, Formula D is coming up, in the streets of long beach, also car meets, and some runs. I been looking forward to buying a camera. What camera if any would you guys recommend, i am pretty sure one of you guy/girls own a nice badass camera that can be in the night, good to take pcitures and at the same time good footage...Anybody, any thoughts?

[Turtle]

Most DSLRs are great to use, but much like driving a car well, it's more about the user than the camera itself.

Many will have an opinion (in many cases a bias) about certain brands. I, personally have a canon which I really like, but I know that Nikon makes an equally great camera which is stronger in different categories (when comparing same-stage models a few years ago, I don't know now). Nikons tend to be slightly more expensive when comparing same-stage models. I would go with either a nikon or a canon DSLR for their upgrade choices. Anything with proprietary lenses or technology limits your choices in the long run.

Do you know much about photography? I was one of the ones who learned on film, when every single shot counted so memorizing certain settings came as second nature when shooting. Nowadays, people can take unlimited pictures. It's a great improvement from 15 years ago, but it makes one lazy, including myself. Also, the settings for digital are slightly different from the same settings on film, but I digress.

In my opinion, I would look less at the megapixels, something everyone judged cameras by in digital infancy (including myself), and look more at the other settings such as ISO (educated to me by Ransack). A higher ISO means that the sensor is more sensitive to light, meaning you can use a faster shutter speed, meaning less blurry pictures at night. Megapixels pretty much means that you can make a picture incredibly large. Something not everyone needs since most pictures end up at 1/3rd the size of a computer screen, at most at 1080p, the limit of your television if you're showing people a slideshow.

Also, packaged lenses are ok, but they're more geared toward group photos and candids. good starter lenses, like stock shocks. For certain effects and textures in a photo, especially when taking pictures of cars, one needs to invest in a different array of lenses. This is when things can get very expensive, so choose wisely. One can just get away with the packaged lenses for their needs, such as myself. I'm just ok with saving the $90 for the lens that I really want for, say, the transmission I will be picking up at the junk yard.

Another thing that I think makes some people lazy (in the actual shooting process, not the post photograph touch-up process), but is a necessary evil is photoshop. Even if the photo is just ok, it can pretty much be fixed in photoshop. Or put an instagram filter on it to mask the imperfections of the raw photograph. If I were to become a photography hobbyist again, I'd focus on taking the photos without wanting to do touch ups afterwards. My opinion. I know that photoshop is an invaluable tool, even then the photo is shot perfectly. My current photography habit is keep shooting and shooting. One is boud to be ok.

Get a good tripod for night shooting. You need a steady camera if you want great night shots because the shutter needs to stay open in most cases. A quick release is extremely helpful.

Now go forth and take a better picture than the first one ever taken. I dare you:



J/K, nobody can ever take a better picture than that, because it's the first (arguably).

R

P.S. Anyone can jump in and correct me. I don't claim to know much about photography, I just know what I picked up.

[Red]

mis, decide how much you want to spend and then look at reviews for cameras in that price range. There's good stuff all the way from $100 to 10,000 and the only question is how good you are willing to buy.

If you want low-light performance then when you read the reviews, look at the sample pix in low light, because that's harder than daylight. There are some cameras with incredible zoom ranges with fixed lenses, might be a good way to start since anything with interchangeable lenses is going to cost you way more if you start spenind money on lenses--and be a total waste if you don't.

http://www.dpreview.com/

A good place to start.

And you might want to buy local, if you can. Some of the menu systems and settings can be real stumpers if you don't actually see how they work.

[SidekickChuck]

I agree with the above replies and employ you to ask yourself, what do I consider to be a good picture?

The "art" of photography is the ability to capture light into, in this case a sensor while a subject or object is the focus on the frame.
A great camera can product horrible pictures if you dont capture light correctly. There are many other aspects to it also, so you have to decide whether you plan on taking the time to learn how to capture your shots, or if you plan to just take pictures and hope for the best. There is a lot of thinking/planning involved in photography.

I am a Canon person myself (Canon 1D MKII-N) and by no means a photographer. But, once you start to play around and learn new things, the pictures start to get better. But if you dont plan on taking time to learn, dont bother spending good money on a DSLR. There are plenty of good Point and Shoot cameras out there.

Starting with Formula D is going to be a let down honestly. Starting out with stills is tough enough, but trying to pan and capture such a fast moving subject will be even harder.

[miswuevos]

Hey guys, i have to say i am a proud owner of a nikon d5100, after reading reviews at certain websites i was able to decide, thanks for the great input!

[Turtle]

Congrats! A great choice, glancing at the amazon reviews. If you don't already know, and I found this out the hard way, get a class 10 SD card if you intend on taking video (for video, at least a class 6 is required). Also, always keep a back-up card. Read up on reviews, sometimes generics are as good of quality as a brand name, or will at least make a good back up. Sometimes, the brand name is only a few dollars more, so you can make a judgement call on that.

Also, if you see a picture that you like, say on the forum, contact the poster who took the picture and ask about their settings, including the type of lens they used. Sometimes, he or she will be willing to share & you can replicate the results. Often they may not, but whatevs.

And as good as the camera takes pictures on automatic settings, play around with the manual settings, you may find it more satisfying, and sometimes slightly over or slightly under exposed pictures look better.

Here's a tip from me, and some might disagree, but for still shots of my car at night I like to use:

1 a tripod, need a steady camera

2 ISO 100

3 the smallest f-stop (the biggest number)

4 a long exposure (I start with 20 seconds and go down, don't remember what number that is)

open the shutter and don't touch the camera until it closes. I don't have one, but I intend on getting a wired remote so that the camera doesn't move when I'm opening the shutter. It's like $10 on amazon. start with the 20 seconds, look at the picture, and dial in the length of the exposure depending on your feeling of the picture (longer for brighter, i think the longest is 30 seconds, shorter for dimmer). IMO, ISO 100 is best for detail and the smallest f-stop (highest number) reduces glare. do not keep the shutter open indefinately, it's a sensor, so it can be damaged. I would only use the longest settable exposure time.

and another tip from my own personal preference, only use the on-camera flash as a last resort as it is very overpowering. The flash tends to wash out the foreground and destroy the background and it also tends to accent blemishes and shinies on faces and stuff. gross. If you can push your camera to the limits and get a great candid in low light without a flash, then by all means do it. If you must use one, I would get an external one that you can angle upward to diffuse the light.

R

[Red]

" IMO, ISO 100 is best for detail and the smallest f-stop (highest number) reduces glare. do not keep the shutter open indefinately, it's a sensor, so it can be damaged."

There's some confusion and misinformation partly from film camera days in there.

ISO ratings, like ASA ratings, were designed to reflect film speed (sensitivity to light) and a digicam really has no ISO ratings. The rating is an equivalent that tells you how the image sensor is being read. If the sensor is "set" to a slow ISO equivalent, it is being set to ignore thermal noise, cosmic rays (yes!) and other background noise that hits the sensor. Setting it to a low ISO number means it will ignore random pixel noise. Setting it to a higher ISO rating, tells it to grab every pixel it can, and that inevitably adds noise, speckling, to the image. The noise-vs-ISO problem varies among companies and sensor types but basically, an ISO rating on a digicam just means a "compromise quality for light sensitivity". When you are making time exposures, whether you use ISO 100 for 20 seconds, or ISO 400 for 5 seconds, the image may be the same, better, or worse, depending on the image sensor in the camera.

"the smallest f-stop (highest number) reduces glare."
No, not quite. Most lenses are computer optimized to be sharpest at about two stops below the highest number. So if your camera lens can go to f/22, it is probably sharpest at f/11. Odds are it is measurably less shapr, or has more color distortion (color fringing, etc.) when it is all the way open or closed, at the extremes. That's just a design compromise they all make.
Glare comes from light entering the lens at wide angles, and if the lens if open all the way, obviously more glass is exposed so more glare can enter. But again, that's a side effect and by the time you reach the middle settings of the lens, glare should not be a problem. If you use a lens hood, you remove the glare problem no matter how far open the lens is.

"the shutter" Really, there's no shutter on a digicam these days. THink about it: The image you see on the back of the camera is coming live from the image sensor. Live, all the time. The sensor is exposed to light all the time, and it is designed for that. Now, if you set the camera for a long time exposure, the camera is "polling" the sensor continuously, and that will heat the sensor up slightly, but there's no way that should damage the sensor, even in a $20 piece of junk camera. Remember--the same sensor is contantly being polled to provide that preview image.

Some cameras still do use a splitter mirror (the digital SLRs) but they have finally gotten around to not playing that game. There's no reason for an optical mirror, and optical prism, an optical finder, when the image sensor is digital and the "real" image can just be put on a tiny monitor in the eye screen.

The industry kinda thrives on FUD, they don't really like to admit how much real quality costs, or be too upfront about how much camera (and lens!) you need to get different image qualities.

The great thing is, "film" is free, so you can experiment away with a hundred shots and not have to see the thousand dollar processing bill for them.<G> Compared to film cameras, even the most expensive digicam is FREE once you factor in the film and printing costs. Well, maybe not printing, after all the inkjet ink IS still $4000 per gallon. Honest.

[Turtle]

Indeed I was picking my brain from the film days. It's hard to unlearn those things. If there are more efficient ways to take the same picture, then by all means.

R

[redroku87]

Running a high stop is great for detail, however you will not get much by the way of depth of field. It leads to kind of flat looking images at times, especially when there is no implied dimension (aka this is behind that and so on).

Personally its all based on the situation. If you are going after a moving target you are going to want to have a faster shutter speed to avoid blurring, and to speed the shot up you are going to have to either A. run a high ISO which risks grain in the image, B. have your shutter speed slow with a high stop, or C. low stop and stupid fast shutter speed.

Its all a matter of situation. There is no one size fits all in photography for every situation.

Personally, if you are going to buy a camera if it has over 10mp its fine.

You don't want to spend the money on the camera body itself, you want to spend it on the lenses. Those are what really earns you the money shots if you will. A good tripod is also a critical thing, especially if you are in situations that will require you to run longer exposure times.


BUT... gear is WORTHLESS unless you actually take time to learn to take pictures.

[taroroot]

You still can't beat an optical viewfinder for action shots. I have a mirrorless m4/3 that has digital viewfinder for my carry around, and while it's possible to use for action, success ratio is low. If i'm going expressly for action the DSLR is the one. The difference between the two may be only fractions of a second, but it makes a big difference. I'm sure it could be solved, but at what cost.

Anyway, as for advice on photography, learn the basic relationship of shutter to aperture and ISO and what kind of effects they have. You can use those effects to your advantage to achieve certain looks you might be going for. High shutter freezes motion and reduces blur, but sometimes you can use blur to convey motion, although its a tricky thing to achieve.
For digital, the ISO thing is kind of like turning up the volume on a stereo. The music get's louder, but static and hiss noise gets louder too. Turning up the ISO on your camera get's you more sensitivity, but you get more noise and the image gets grainy. And like in the megapixel wars, ISO seems to be the newest marketing buzz. Just because a camera can be set to go to 256,000 ISO doesn't mean it's any good there. Your pictures will start to look like impressionistic paintings, which might be an effect you're trying to achieve so I suppose it's not wholey useless!

A key thing is to go out and take lots of pictures, and digital has made it easy to do just that. However you should make it a point to pay attention to what you did with the camera and what it did to the pictures. Learning that is the difference between taking good photographs and just taking a million snapshots.

[Red]

There's no reason, technically, that a digital viewfinder should be any "slower" than an optical one, that I've heard of. In fact seceral of the camera companies have out out digital-only cameras, and even Nikon has finally conceded with two lines of digital-only cameras. Consider that with a digital camera you are only saving what the image sensor is seeing. And that's the digital image. So you really don't want an optical viewfinder, you want to know what the image sensor is seeing and recording at any given moment, and that's what a digital display will show you.

If a particular camera has "image lag" in the viewfinder or some other problem, that's just cheap or poor engineering. It doesn't have to be that way. The same way that most SLRs on the market used to have optical viewfinders that cropped the image and showed it incorrectly, but a few of the good ones were 100% images. And only a few of them, because for most folks 100% wasn't important but price was.

That hasn't changed.

[GTSRolla34]

If you go the DSLR route, I'd recommend spending the money on good glass over a upper level camera. You could spend $3000-6000 for a pro camera but if you can't couple it with upper level lenses your not getting the most out of the camera. You could go with a D5200/D3200 (I'm a Nikon guy) and get 1 or 2 good lenses and have a great setup. The newer consumer/prosumer bodies offer more than enough to take great photos. Get some good to great glass and practice a lot and you'll wind up with great images.

With sensor improvements you can take the ISO up quite a bit to give yourself some leeway when it comes to aperature. Set the camera to Aperature priority and adjust the ISO to get close to your desired shutter speed. If you start to experience too much noise you will know you have to open up the aperature a bit to compensate.

[taroroot]

Yea, in theory you should be able to make a digital viewfinder that is superior to an optical one in speed, unless you're talking a mirrorless optical viewfinder like Sony is trying, or a rangefinder style. Optical has that mirror you have to flip out of the way and in theory you should be able to make an electronic refresh way faster. But its at what cost. You can get a entry level DSLR for $800. I don't know of a digital viewfinder camera at that price that performs as well for action. And contrast detection AF is slower for action. Although technology is making inroads on improving that with the hybrid AF sensors, but its not there yet. There also probably is a perceived market, the mirrorless styles I think they perceive the market as being less focused on action so they don't persue that strongly.
Cost benefit balance. Like my pet peeve with the consumer HD video with rolling shutter. It bugs the heck out of me and looks terrible for action, but its expensive to fix completely.

There's no reason, technically, that a digital viewfinder should be any "slower" than an optical one, that I've heard of. In fact seceral of the camera companies have out out digital-only cameras, and even Nikon has finally conceded with two lines of digital-only cameras. Consider that with a digital camera you are only saving what the image sensor is seeing. And that's the digital image. So you really don't want an optical viewfinder, you want to know what the image sensor is seeing and recording at any given moment, and that's what a digital display will show you.

If a particular camera has "image lag" in the viewfinder or some other problem, that's just cheap or poor engineering. It doesn't have to be that way. The same way that most SLRs on the market used to have optical viewfinders that cropped the image and showed it incorrectly, but a few of the good ones were 100% images. And only a few of them, because for most folks 100% wasn't important but price was.

That hasn't changed.

[Red]

"...a mirrorless optical viewfinder like Sony is trying, or a rangefinder style."
Both niche products. A split beam has been done before, it always has to follow the harsh laws of physics and there's only half the number of photons to go each way. Generally unacceptable for higher-end work. Same problem with a rangefinder, there will always be a parallax problem. Of course that didn't stop many hundreds on millions of Brownie cameras or Leicas, but ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away.

"Optical has that mirror you have to flip out of the way and in theory you should be able to make an electronic refresh way faster. But its at what cost."
Well, my first color TV was a radical new Sony Trinitron at the heavily discounted price of some $650 and that was a 19" screen. How much flat panel tv can you get for that money today? Right. As Bill Gates used to say "Hardware is cheap".
The optical prism is damned expensive in the viewfinder. The fast mirror, with shock absorbers, and mechanical shutter, is also damned expensive AND delicate. I think the real reason we have seen so little change is because of snob appeal. If your camera doesn't go "KERCHUNK!" when you take the picture, no one knows how much you spent for it. No snob/logo appeal. Which has always been a big issue in consumer markets.

Since the image sensor is working all the time anyway, capturing constant images anyway, and displaying them on the outside view panel all the time in real time anyway...It should be obvious that the same image could be displayed on the internal eyepiece, the same way, for less cost. In terms of image lag? Oh, come on. It always takes time to raise a mirror clear of the image path on a film camera, there's lag in there too.

Anyone who used a film camera to shoot something like a soccer match can tell you how hard it is to exactly snap the moment of contact between the foot and ball. That's what motordrives were made for--and "virtual" motordrives for digicams are dirt cheap. Same problem, same answer. The rest is all marketing.
"

[Cavi Mike]

So much to learn with a DSLR plus they're heavy, bulky and expensive. DSLR's are for people that find a great shot everywhere they go and feel the need to go home and get their camera to capture it. If you just want a "nice" camera so you came gets some decent shots at a show, you don't need a DSLR. You don't want a DSLR.

"Back in the day" I used to take my aunts Canon SLR with me to shows and after a few times dealing with all that crap, I stopped bringing it because I found I wasn't really even enjoying the show anymore. Soon digital cameras came about so eventually I got a decent point-n-shoot with a nice zoom and I just stick it in my pocket. Now when I'm at shows I can still enjoy it and the only thing I carry in my hand is a mono-pod.

If you really want to mess with all the equipment and adjustments and feel like sorting through dozens of garbage shots from a show because you couldn't get the settings right - get a DSLR. If you want to just get some nice pics, get a point-n-shoot. I personally have found Sony's with the Carl Zeiss lens get the best images without having to mess with a single thing so that's what I've been using.

[GTSRolla34]

"If you really want to mess with all the equipment and adjustments and feel like sorting through dozens of garbage shots from a show because you couldn't get the settings right - get a DSLR. If you want to just get some nice pics, get a point-n-shoot. I personally have found Sony's with the Carl Zeiss lens get the best images without having to mess with a single thing so that's what I've been using."

That seems kind of harsh. I carry my DSLR everywhere with me on a Black Rapid strap. D7000 w/ 24-70 f/2.8 (or D90 w/ battery grip). When I go out to events I still enjoy myself and the event. I set the camera up before I get there for the situations I'll encounter and typically don't mess with things once I get there. Any minor inconsistencies I fix in Lightroom

[Red]

This week there were some industry comments that point and shoot cameras are going to laregly go away now, replaced by cell phones. So if anyone wants a PAS this could be the last year to buy from a wide choice.

But "dozens of garbage shots" does sound a bit like sour grapes. No one, no matter how good or cheap their camera is, captures the right shot every time. The whole digital-slr concept is marketing nonsense these days, there's no reason for the optical finder with modern electronics. But the camera companies have generally withheld their best options for the dslr market, and that includes burst shooting. If you want to capture something fast at an exact point, either you have great luck, great reflexes, or a motor drive. Ergh, burst mode. And you throw out the garbage shots, which may actually be damn fine shots--just not as good as THE best one on the roll.

Mastering camera settings? I guess that's why Starbucks is so popular. Lots of folks can't master their own coffeepot, much less figure out what a good cup of coffee tastes like. (Ain't StarBurnts, either.)

[miswuevos]

alarming for the camera companies, now in days everyone is a photographer with their iphones, galaxy s3/4, ipads + instagram cool effects