Browse Tag: dslr

Which camera type should you buy?

Recently I noticed that almost all compact cameras are exchanged for phones or big DSLRs. I never actually counted how many people (mostly tourists) are using compacts cameras or DSLRs, or nor I did any statistics, but all these big cameras are somehow eye-catching. It became trendy. So I have decided to ask some proud users of DSLRs (again, tourists and some acquaintances) what is the reason for buying one. Answers were mostly similar and refer to image quality and affordable price.

Now, I really don’t mind someone else carrying big and heavy DSLR around their neck, but let’s see is it really necessary.

It all starts with the light. If there is no light, there is no photo. That’s why it’s important to handle the light properly. We use lenses for that. There are many different types of lenses and they affect the light that is passing through on different ways. Better quality lenses are putting through the light ‘on a better way’ so more information are preserved when the light exits the lens on the other side. And when that happens, the light will hit the sensor. The sensor is a vital component in photo formation process. It ‘reads’ the light which hits it, and transforms it into a digital signals which are later transformed into a file which you can open on your computer. The better sensors ‘reading’ skills, better results. Transformations that come after the reading are also important, but let’s keep this as simple as possible and assume that transformations are always done well and we don’t have to care about it.

So basically you need a good (big) sensor and good lens for good quality photos.

Bigger sensors are better sensors. You can find many topics about that online, but long story short, bigger sensors have better low-light performance (will make less noise in photos with higher ISO), they have better dynamic range and as bigger they become, they make more background blur.

Now let’s check sensor sizes before we continue. Here you have different sensor sizes compared from 1/3.2″ to Medium Format.

text6802

And now, DSLRs from the beginning of the story, they do posses bigger sensors (usually APS-C or bigger) than compacts, which makes them quite a good option to buy. They also come with some sort of quality lens, at least better than most compacts. But they are not the only option.

A couple years ago, manufacturers introduced mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras. These cameras usually have bigger sensors than compacts, and allows you to change lenses. Which is cool! They tend to give you quality of photos as DSLRs do, but they are also tending to be small. Unfortunately the size of the sensor dictates the size of the lenses, so bigger the sensor bigger are lenses.

TLDR, if you want really, really good quality photos, take some mirrorless camera or some DSLR if you don’t mind carrying it all around. Otherwise, if you want something slightly better than your phone photos, take some compact. And if you don’t mind the quality of your phone photos.. well, then you have no problem 🙂

UPDATE: Below you can find a comparison of camera types, cameras and sensor sizes, which might be helpful to illustrate the described situation.

g5565

Sync your clock when shooting with a partner

One day, totally at random, some guy asked me on the street if I’m am being available to cover an event that they organize. I am a hobby photographer and usually I shoot what I want, when I want, where I want, and I didn’t have experience with such things. But I accepted the challenge. It was a Cameroonian association dinner party, followed with many different activities with 100+ people present.

DSC_1027

After I got timeline of the event and started planning everything, I realized that I might not be ‘enough’ to cover everything as I am not skilled enough. So I decided to call a friend for help. She accepted the invitation, we did quite nice job and the client was happy at the end.

DSC_1203

But even though I tried to think about everything I didn’t think about how are we going to merge our photos after the shooting, and that gave me a small headache. When I copied all the photos (~2×500 photos) from our memory cards, I found out that I have a bunch of photos, with no pattern I can use to separate them. So I had to do it manually, and there was a lot of job, because that celebration included many different sections: red carpet, opening ceremony, prayer, dinner, drama, fashion show, etc. I lost maybe 15-30 minutes on sorting all the photos, and maybe it’s not too much, but I would be more happy if I didn’t have to.

Check these instructions (Sync Multiple Camera Time Stamps In Lightroom 4, Fix Timestamp Issues on Multi-Camera Shoots) if you’ve already did the same mistake.

So I was thinking what could I do to make it better next time, and realized that I can sort photos by the time they were taken. But there is a catch: for that you need to sync clock on your cameras that you are doing shooting with.

clock sync

If you are using more cameras or if you are shooting with a friend, just take some time before and configure your clocks to show the same time. After that you can easily sort them by time on your computer.