How to Choose a Camera

By Steve Thomas
The Powerful Photography Coach

This lesson is fairly long. You may want to print it for reading.

The assortment of cameras on the market is practically endless, with new models of digital cameras appearing all the time. How do you wade through the choices to find one that is right for you? Strangely, the last thing you want to do when choosing a camera is choose a camera. Why is that the last thing? Well, until you have figured out the kind of photography you want to do and how you plan to use the pictures you take; actually picking the camera is very difficult. Once you know those things, picking a camera becomes much easier since most cameras on the market won’t meet your needs so you can eliminate most of them very quickly. There is an excellent web site that provides very complete reviews of new cameras. Digital Photography Review is the name of the site. Click here  http://www.dpreview.com/ . I won’t suggest specific cameras in this lesson; I will give you the information so you can make an informed decision about which features in a camera are important for you.

Do you print your pictures and want good image quality? How big?
Do you project your pictures on a screen or view them on a TV?
Do you crop your pictures to eliminate extraneous portions of the picture or to get a closer view of the subject?
Do you do any sort of action photography (e.g. sports, racing, kids playing?)
Do you take pictures in low light situations?
Do you use flash or studio lights?
Do you take close-up pictures?
Do you do product photography where a significant chuck of the background is white?
Do you intend to carry the camera with you all the time or just bring it on specific occasions?
Are your hands big or small?

Do you print your pictures and want good image quality? This question helps you determine how many megapixels you will need your camera to deliver. You need to be careful here. Some camera manufacturers play specification games and highlight something called “interpolated resolution” or something similar. What the camera does is take a relatively small number of pixels and calculate what the pixels in between the actual pixels might have been by averaging adjacent pixels. Those interpolated pixels are added to the image, increasing the pixel count without increasing the resolution of the picture. If your maximum print size is 4 x 6 inches, a camera that delivers 2 megapixels is fine for your needs. Here is a table showing the megapixel size you will need based on printing or displaying at 300 dots per inch.

If you significantly crop your pictures, you will need a camera that delivers more resolution than the table shows so your images don’t fall apart because there aren’t enough pixels left after cropping. I had this problem when I was working with a 2.1 megapixel camera several years ago. I was taking close up pictures of very small products. With that camera, going a close as the camera could focus; the product filled less than 10% of the image area. After cropping I was left with 200 kilopixels or less and the image was not at all crisp. I upgraded to a 5 megapixel camera and the images became much better, though still not as crisp and sharp as I would have liked but it was the state of the art at the time.

Do you project your pictures on a screen or view them on a TV?
Some digital cameras have the ability to connect directly to the video input of a TV; this way you can see your pictures in all their glory on the big screen. This way you can easily bore your audience with all the pictures you took – the good ones, the bad ones, the blurry ones and the ones that should never see the light of day (I’ll let your imagination roll with that last one!) The direct TV connection is a good tool to be able to preview your pictures. If you are going to show your pictures to friends and family, preview the pictures first and delete the bad ones. A few powerful pictures will convince the audience that you are a photographic genius, while showing too many bad pictures, will give you a reputation as a person to avoid if you want to show pictures in the future. Also, don’t force your audience to tilt their heads sideways to see your pictures. Be sure to rotate portrait orientation pictures before you project them for people.

So, if you are going to project directly to a TV, make sure the camera has the capability to rotate pictures in the camera or the ability to download the pictures into your computer where you can rotate images that need to be rotated and otherwise enhance the pictures before putting them back in the camera for display on the TV.

Do you crop your pictures to eliminate extraneous portions of the picture or get a closer view of the subject?
Most pictures can use some cropping. If you do this extensively or pick very small portions of a picture, you may want to step up to a higher resolution camera so your picture quality stays good. Most cameras save pictures in JPG or similar compressed format. You may have the option to select the level of compression. Higher end cameras often have the ability to save the picture in a format called “RAW”. These pictures take a lot of memory since they are completely uncompressed. If you do a lot of cropping however this format can give you much better quality. Working with RAW images takes quite a bit more work than working with a JPG or TIF image from the camera since no corrections or smoothing have been applied to the image. If you are interested in learning about editing RAW images, please let me know at steve@goodphotographyinfo.com. If there is enough interest I’ll create an advanced course that you will be able to purchase.

When a picture is compressed there is some loss of image quality. You can see artifacts of the compression process if you zoom in on a picture in the computer. The more compression you or the camera selects, the more compression artifacts you will see and the worse the image quality will be when you print a large picture. You will see fringing around edges in the picture, especially in areas where there is a sudden transition from light to dark. With extremely aggressive compression there can be problems even in the middle of a picture as you can see in this group of picture. You may notice incorrect color patches in the middle of the animal’s fur. Here are three pictures to show you the effect. To see larger versions of the images, click on the image to open a new window to see the image full-size. In these small versions there isn’t much to see. I created these pictures by selecting a small portion of the original picture and applying more compression when I saved the two more compressed versions.

Compression delivered by the camera set to “fine”	Somewhat aggressive compression	Very aggressive compression

Do you do any sort of action photography (e.g. sports, racing, kids playing?)
There is a common characteristic of many digital cameras called “shutter lag.” This is the time from when you press the shutter release until the camera actually takes the picture. In action situations it can be very maddening to see exactly the picture you want in the view finder, only to have it be gone by the time the camera focuses, sets exposure and finally takes the picture. There are things you can do to minimize shutter lag – such as using manual focus if that is an option for your camera - , but if you regularly take action pictures you will be much happier with a camera that exhibits minimal shutter lag.

Also, there are cameras on the market that can quickly take several pictures in a row. This is wonderful when taking pictures of moving objects since it gives you a better chance of taking a picture at the peak of the action. What you would do is press the shutter release a short time before the peak of the action and let the camera take several pictures in rapid succession. The Exact method to do this depends on the camera. For some cameras you press and hold the shutter release button, for others you need to make a menu selection to tell the camera to take a multi-shot burst. For me, having to make a menu selection defeats the purpose of the multi-shot burst.

Do you take pictures in low light situations?
There are three issues involved in taking pictures in low-light situations. The first is the ability to see enough through the camera’s viewfinder or screen to be able to compose the picture. My first digital camera was very bad in this area. Even if I was going to use flash, I had to guess at the framing of the picture because I couldn’t see anything through the camera. For my next camera I got one that had an infrared (IR) source mounted on the lens. I could select “night framing” mode to turn on the IR source. The camera can see the infrared light and shows me the scene in the viewfinder. To the unaided eye, the scene still looks dark, but now I can easily frame the shot I want.

The second issue is the sensitivity of the sensor to low light levels. You can get an idea of the sensitivity by looking at the ISO rating given to the camera. ISO ratings date back to the days of film, where it used to be called the “ASA” rating. A film or digital camera with an ISO or ASA rating of 100 is good for handheld photography in daylight situations.

Most mid-range digital cameras allow the user to select from several ISO settings – just like changing the film in a camera to use high-speed film. So if you think you may be taking pictures in low light levels without using flash, look for a camera that allows you to do this.

As the ISO rating gets higher, the sensitivity to light increases. For both film and digital as the rating increase the pictures tend to become more grainy. The better the digital sensor the cleaner the picture will appear at higher ISO settings.

The third issue is the size of the lens. For a given lens length, the larger the diameter of the front glass of a lens, generally the more light it will gather and the better it will function at low light levels. The trade-off is that when you actually take a picture with the lens wide open, the depth of field is very short so you need to take extra care to be sure that all of the important parts of the picture are about the same distance from the camera so they will be in focus.

Do you use flash or studio lights?
For a lot of situations where you want to use flash, an on-camera flash will work acceptably. There are, however, many cases where you pictures will be a lot better if you can move the flash away from the camera lens. When you are taking pictures of people this is very important to avoid red-eye, which happens when light from the flash bounces around inside the person’s eyeball and finally bounces out in the same direction it arrived. When the flash is very near the axis of the camera lens, you get red-eye. By moving the flash a little ways away from the lens, the reflected light doesn’t enter the lens and you don’t get red-eye.

Studio lights are separate flash units, often with  a translucent umbrella to diffuse the light. They are professional-level tools and beyond the scope of these lessons

Do you take close-up pictures?
If you want to take close-up pictures then you need to pick a camera that has “macro focus” capability. That means that it has the capability to focus on an object that is close to the camera – say 10 to 20 cm away from the lens. If you attempt to take close-up pictures using a camera that doesn’t have macro focus capability, you will be disappointed with the blurry results.

Do you do photography where a significant chuck of the background is white?
This is very common in small product photography but can also be an issue if you are taking pictures at the beach or in the snow. What happens is that the camera reads the overall light level and reduces the exposure based on the assumption that the overall brightness of the scene averages out to a medium gray level called 18% reflection gray. To deal with this there are several approaches that can deal with this.

First, you can adjust the exposure to increase the exposure by 2EV (EV stands for Exposure Value). This will require some experimentation to determine the proper amount of adjustment for each situation. Some of the lower end cameras don’t have exposure adjustment capability.

Second, if your camera has the capability to freeze the exposure, you can go to a camera store and buy an 18% reflection gray card. Place the gray card in the same light that our subject and set the camera’s exposure for proper exposure of the gray card. Keep the same exposure settings and take the shot of the subject. For many modern cameras you can set the exposure by pressing the shutter release button part way. For others this also sets the focus so this may not work for all cameras.

Third, if the camera has the capability to select what part of the picture it uses to adjust exposure, choose the part of the picture that includes your subject.

Fourth, choose the “backlight” setting on the camera if it has one. This generally will adjust the exposure by 1 to 2 EV depending on the camera.

Do you intend to carry the camera with you all the time or just bring it on specific occasions?
My personal experience is that if the camera is too big, I tend to only bring it when I specifically plan to take pictures since it becomes a burden to lug around the camera and accessories. So this ends up being a trade-off and may argue for having a smaller camera for everyday pictures and a larger, more capable camera when you are on an adventure where photography is an important element.

Are your hands big or small?
I have big hands so a camera that is good for me probably would be hard to use for a person with small hands. Before you buy a camera you really should hold it in your hands to be sure it feels comfortable and that your finger easily reaches the shutter release button without having to stretch or bend your finger too much.

Thats it for this lesson. If you have specific questions, please send them to me at steve@goodphotographyinfo.com

Steve Thomas
The Powerful Photography Coach

Lesson 1 Subject Placement
Lesson 2 Leading Lines
Lesson 3 Light and Shadow
Lesson 4 Point of View
Lesson 5 Available Light
Lesson 6 Outdoor Lighting
Lesson 7 Close-up Photography
Lesson 8 Depth of Field

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(c) Steve Thomas 2007-2010 All rights reserved. This is copywrited content and may not be reproduced in any form without the express permission of the author.