Jay's Random Thoughts

I am a huge fan of digital photography and have spent the last 4 years learning more about it.  I have decided to share some of my knowledge on the blog and have created a new category to host the material.  Just to set the proper groundwork, I am not a professional.  My goal is to try to simplify complex concepts that come from photography.

I have plenty of friends who just like to push the button to take the picture and not worry about any details.  That is fine, but do you ever wonder what is actually happening when you push the button.  Do you understand the concepts of aperture, ISO and shutter speed and how these three elements impact your pictures?  Do you understand how to best utilize a flash?  These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in the coming months.  I will strive to keep posts short and to the point and oriented to people who are casual photographers.

Enjoy! 

I am a huge fan of digital cameras and believe them to be tremendously powerful. There are all sorts of cameras out there with all kinds of different form factors. Many people like the small and portable cameras which are great and convenient. However, I am extremely focused on image quality and prefer digital SLRs for the fast shutter speeds, lense flexibility and image quality.

Historically, there have been two main players in the SLR space and the same two players are very strong in the dSLR space as well. The competitors are Nikon and Canon, and you find people who strongly prefer one of the other. I chose Canon, but that just happened to be because they had the best dSLR to meet my requirements when I was looking to purchase the camera. I continue to love my camera and highly recommend Canon’s dSLRs.

On one final note, my favorite site for general camera reviews and discussions is DPReview.com. These guys do a thorough review of all digital cameras and are a great resource to utilize if you plan on buying a camera. They cover both dSLR and traditional point and shoot cameras. I believe that this is one of the most comprehensive and thorough digital camera review site on the Internet.

I am a big fan of digital photography. One of the questions people ask is which camera to get. The answer is that it depends on the photographer and the environment where you photograph. The biggest question is whether to get a digital SLR or P&S. I am not covering that decision in this discussion.

Wen it comes to P&S cameras, the first question you need to decide is how much manual control you want. Some cameras offer many manual control options like shutter speed or aperture. Some people care about and want to manually set these options since it provides more flexibility and creativity. Typically these cameras that offer manual features also offer full automatic and so you don’t always have to monkey with the settings. However, the trade off is that cameras with more manual features are typically larger in size. Thus, the choice is between small size and portability with a bit larger size and more flexibility. Here are a couple of examples with links to listings at Amazon (Note that I am a Canon guy and so these are listings for Canon cameras, all the other manufacturers offer cameras with similar features.)

Manual Camera: Powershot G9

Automatic Camera: Powershot SD870

The choice betweent these two types of cameras comes down to the user. Are you more interested in the best image quality, configuration flexibility and are willing to sacrifice some size for these features or are you more interested in having a very small camera where you simply just press the button with little or not user interaction. The choice comes down to user preference. I personally prefer the former because I enjoy manually changing camera parameters.