A very interesting point coming from you (as one of the many photographers I really look up to here). I say interesting because I have never used "My Menu" - that will give me something to study up and expand on if required.
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Your most important features when looking for a camera
- Thread starter Lawrence
- Start date
A very interesting point coming from you (as one of the many photographers I really look up to here). I say interesting because I have never used "My Menu" - that will give me something to study up and expand on if required.
Dual card slots
An absolute must in my selection of any future camera. I just think it is so useful to have that 2nd card for a multitude of options.
Thank you fellow KIWI
Built-in timelapse. I went nuts on those with my first D600. You don't need a separate intervalometer.
Another feature I don't know much about but yes definitely a money saver if built in.
I watched a review on the D850 yesterday and he (Steve Perry) mentioned that if you wanted to up the FPS of the D850 to something near the D500 you needed to buy a battery grip and a battery. Just these two items added up to a little less than $1000. I have no idea what an intervalometer would cost but I think a few pennies for sure.
I would approach the list and talk very differently. What and how do ANY features produce better images? Cameras now are sold based on long feature lists which frankly have almost no impact on the results or are used so rarely as to be insignificant.
View any photo by camera updaters, those who are on constant update cycles and you will see flaws in technique and composition that should have been resolved 4 cameras ago and never were because the effort and limited spare time for photography was spent learning a new system.
The list of essentials in a camera really is pretty short but the race for higher ISO seems the most over-inflated in importance when one compares results and conditions. There is a generation of photographers who seem to think it is a goal worthy of pursuing to turn a camera into a nightscope far more sensitive than the eye and getting fake color and detail as if a dark scene is daylight. They ignore much about the nature of light and its data conveyance. Information Theory undermines that belief.
If someone wants a list of priorities for improving their photography, a camera body is pretty far down the list. Any camera made in the last 5 years is perfectly capable of much more than what we see produced with them or any camera. I conduct photowalks for tourists and do some workshops and have to say there is far too much emphasis on buzzwords and feature lists than basic knowledge of visual arts, and it seems to be universal between societies since my clients are from all continents, all seem to share the same camera-is-the-hobby approach. At the end of the day, regardless of camera, the shared and compared images favor the same people, those with a basic understanding of exposure and composition. Those with an iPhone and those with D5's and 15kgs of lenses is no predictor of who came up with images worth looking at.
Can anyone think of a camera by any company in the last dozen years that is not perfectly capable of producing gallery worthy images? Feature list keep getting longer but the number of view-worthy images never increases.
My recommended feature list includes:
Low enough price to not hurt the budget for other more important things
Low enough weight to encourage frequent use
Small enough to be taken with someone more often
Easy access to full manual control
12 mpx or larger
sensor size at least the size of a pin-hole camera
and a good lens or two available for its mount type
Being quiet is helpful for some styles.
At least one media slot, dual or triple slots are a lot less important than some claim
Suitable for at least a couple gb cards.....the trend to large cards is a beginners mistake
That list might be overly detailed but it is enough for award winning photos.
View any photo by camera updaters, those who are on constant update cycles and you will see flaws in technique and composition that should have been resolved 4 cameras ago and never were because the effort and limited spare time for photography was spent learning a new system.
The list of essentials in a camera really is pretty short but the race for higher ISO seems the most over-inflated in importance when one compares results and conditions. There is a generation of photographers who seem to think it is a goal worthy of pursuing to turn a camera into a nightscope far more sensitive than the eye and getting fake color and detail as if a dark scene is daylight. They ignore much about the nature of light and its data conveyance. Information Theory undermines that belief.
If someone wants a list of priorities for improving their photography, a camera body is pretty far down the list. Any camera made in the last 5 years is perfectly capable of much more than what we see produced with them or any camera. I conduct photowalks for tourists and do some workshops and have to say there is far too much emphasis on buzzwords and feature lists than basic knowledge of visual arts, and it seems to be universal between societies since my clients are from all continents, all seem to share the same camera-is-the-hobby approach. At the end of the day, regardless of camera, the shared and compared images favor the same people, those with a basic understanding of exposure and composition. Those with an iPhone and those with D5's and 15kgs of lenses is no predictor of who came up with images worth looking at.
Can anyone think of a camera by any company in the last dozen years that is not perfectly capable of producing gallery worthy images? Feature list keep getting longer but the number of view-worthy images never increases.
My recommended feature list includes:
Low enough price to not hurt the budget for other more important things
Low enough weight to encourage frequent use
Small enough to be taken with someone more often
Easy access to full manual control
12 mpx or larger
sensor size at least the size of a pin-hole camera
and a good lens or two available for its mount type
Being quiet is helpful for some styles.
At least one media slot, dual or triple slots are a lot less important than some claim
Suitable for at least a couple gb cards.....the trend to large cards is a beginners mistake
That list might be overly detailed but it is enough for award winning photos.
I would approach the list and talk very differently. What and how do ANY features produce better images? Cameras now are sold based on long feature lists which frankly have almost no impact on the results or are used so rarely as to be insignificant.
View any photo by camera updaters, those who are on constant update cycles and you will see flaws in technique and composition that should have been resolved 4 cameras ago and never were because the effort and limited spare time for photography was spent learning a new system.
The list of essentials in a camera really is pretty short but the race for higher ISO seems the most over-inflated in importance when one compares results and conditions. There is a generation of photographers who seem to think it is a goal worthy of pursuing to turn a camera into a nightscope far more sensitive than the eye and getting fake color and detail as if a dark scene is daylight. They ignore much about the nature of light and its data conveyance. Information Theory undermines that belief.
If someone wants a list of priorities for improving their photography, a camera body is pretty far down the list. Any camera made in the last 5 years is perfectly capable of much more than what we see produced with them or any camera. I conduct photowalks for tourists and do some workshops and have to say there is far too much emphasis on buzzwords and feature lists than basic knowledge of visual arts, and it seems to be universal between societies since my clients are from all continents, all seem to share the same camera-is-the-hobby approach. At the end of the day, regardless of camera, the shared and compared images favor the same people, those with a basic understanding of exposure and composition. Those with an iPhone and those with D5's and 15kgs of lenses is no predictor of who came up with images worth looking at.
Can anyone think of a camera by any company in the last dozen years that is not perfectly capable of producing gallery worthy images? Feature list keep getting longer but the number of view-worthy images never increases.
My recommended feature list includes:
Low enough price to not hurt the budget for other more important things
Low enough weight to encourage frequent use
Small enough to be taken with someone more often
Easy access to full manual control
12 mpx or larger
sensor size at least the size of a pin-hole camera
and a good lens or two available for its mount type
Being quiet is helpful for some styles.
At least one media slot, dual or triple slots are a lot less important than some claim
Suitable for at least a couple gb cards.....the trend to large cards is a beginners mistake
That list might be overly detailed but it is enough for award winning photos.
Beautifully put and so true.
I think I may start and end my talk with this if I may?
Its a bit like golf in a way - when I played my mates were forever buying new drivers and putters, the latest ball and wedges yet their scores and their handicaps remained the same. Marketers are a shrewd bunch indeed.
Thank you very much for your comments.
Yes,, I think the era where the digital camera was a suitable replacement for the beloved film was when the D90 was released. It is only a stop less low light for any given signal to noise ratio compared with any other Dx camera since. The cameras that had essentially "ISO'less" noise character began with that camera and the followup D7000 made that linear plot of noise to ISO rule straight which meant if one lowered ISO a stop resulting in an underexposed image, and boosted in post processing by a stop would be virtually identical to an image exposed 1 stop higher and properly exposed. That is when read noise is lower than A/D + analog amplification noise. Canon shooters could not do that but Nikon owners could boost shadows up to 5-6 stops without a lot of a banding and column noise or loss of color. I would say the turning point where Digital had less downside than film was the D90. Every company since 2008 has had easily good enough performance that features had to be added to entice upgrading because of photographic performance plateaued and the changes were small incremental advances that made little real-life IQ difference. The D90 also kicked off the video craze for DSLRs. The other camera that made a step jump was the D3 and D3s. The limits of image quality stopped being defined by the camera and shifted more to the user.My D90 makes it, but my D100 is disappointed !
To add to the discussion I would suggest an excursion to the nearest fine art gallery with top regarded art and encourage to see art as a compositional artform, and how the artists used cues from lighting to and composition to tell a story or show much more than just brush strokes.
Other aids to improving quickly that does not involve getting a new camera is going to workshops or going to shoot with an advanced photographer whose work you admire.
And if the itch is to buy something.....#1 return on investment and step up is lighting, any sort of lighting you have control of will supercharge your images. I hear the complaint from those stuck in a creative rut that they "only shoot natural light, I don't like the flash look".
ALL light is natural and that is all we have to see with. We do not see objects, we see reflections of light and selective absorption by the frequency of light. Our brain uses that to infer what the reflecting surface was. Anytime you can help tell your story with more control of the information, you have expanded your artistic vocabulary. The complaint about the "flash look"is they object to the poor use of light without realizing that they are only a few hours of practice away from turning "flash look" shots into "hang over the mantle-worthly portraits" It is hard to find a great photo where photographer influenced light was not a key. Every photo was seen on the cover of a magazine, or ad had augmented light, even those shots of people on the beach used controlled or augmented light. No one noticed bad light because it was used well....but it WAS used.
A simple homemade reflector can change everything, a $3 shoot of white foam core can wonders in portraiture, indoors or out. A homemade scrim on that beach shot makes the difference between a glossy magazine cover shot and a hard mid-day raccoon eye snapshot that is tossed out. A few cheap Chinese flash units with RF controller, cheaper than any lens, can put studio quality in your camera bag.
If someone is upgrading camera bodies before upgrading lighting options that are missing the boat and wasting money. ALL sorts of photography benefit from more or better quality of light, even nature photography where the eye does not expect augmented light was used to capture the great shots out there.
A great camera club activity is renting a studio for 2-3 hours and a makeup artist hired. Or a joint construction project of making a number of handmade modifiers.
For those interested in model photography, one of the hardest crafts to master is posing, it is a skill and makes a lot of difference in the results particularly if your subjects are friends or family, amateurs.
Having the club hire a pro model for a few hours and having them teach you how to work with models. A good model has a lot to teach a photographer who is beginning and finding one who is interested in helping potential employers learn posing can be very instructive. 1 hour with a pro male or female model trumps any books on the subject of posing. Even if only doing head shops or head and shoulder shots, learning posing makes a great difference between a selfie and an image of art. Female models are more versatile generally with a broader range of assignments and easier to find ones with good pro experience. As a workshop for the whole club, a lot could be learned in an hour.