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For a good place to see digital camera reviews, discussion forums etc... http://www.dpreview.com/
Want to buy a digital camera? Things to remember...
1. "Point and shoots" are toys. Get an SLR, buying a point and shoot is like buying a Bose audio system. Of course there are varying quality levels among point and shoot cameras from the very cheap (Bose equivalent level) to the better, "Upper-end Mass-market" level. I've heard good things about the Nikon Coolpix 5700 and a few others in the same range.
2. It's not just how many pixels, the size and quality of the CCD are probably more important. The CCD also makes a big difference in the, "picture angle" normally referred to as the, "effective focal length". Actually the focal length of the lens doesn't change but the coverage angle of the photo does. It's wrong to think that current digital SLR cameras with less than full 35 mm format CCD sensors have a, "telephoto advantage". They don't. Yes, your 200 mm telephoto lens will have a 1.5x effective focal length multiplier but this is only because the small CCD is cropping the image. A full 24 x 36 mm CCD with equal pixel density can crop that same image to match the smaller CCD and have the same telephoto advantage. Even some Photography Magazine articles have incorrectly claimed the small CCD has advantages but the simple truth is that it does not.
3. The lens makes all the difference. Think of the lens like it's the speaker in your audio system! Lenses, like loudspeakers are prone to distortion, color fringing sometimes called, "chromatic aberration" and overall picture sharpness. A great web site about post processing reduction of distortion and chromatic aberration can be found at J. Brian Caldwell's web site.
4. DPReview allows you to select two cameras and compare them side by side. This is a really handy tool, use it. You can also read about your camera in discussion groups and benefit from the experience of others in the owner opinions section.
5. Don't buy from any mail order place especially one with very low prices without first checking them out on epinions.
6. http://www.photodo.com/nav/prodindex.html This site compares lenses. Check here before buying. Sadly, it hasn't been updated since 2000.
7. Using the program mode is like using those pre-set tone settings on cheap audio equipment. Use manual mode and use "spot metering", you will get better results. Don't pay any attention to the exposure compensation, it doesn't do anything. Well, I use to think this was some sort of trim adjustment effecting exposure or aperture or something but actually it only effects the meter. In automatic mode it causes the camera to select different settings. In manual mode it causes you to get confused. Personally I leave this at zero and do my own metering compensation. The metering in a camera is calibrated to 18% gray. This means that if you point your camera at something the light metering is going to adjust the exposure settings to make that object come out 18% gray or it's equivalent. It could be any color, but the luminosity will be adjusted to the same as 18% gray. So, if I'm pointing the camera at something I believe to be about one stop darker than 18% gray I just adjust the shutter and or aperture so the meter reads one stop below 18% gray. To me this makes more sense and is less confusing than using the exposure compensation. Normally in daylight I meter on the highlights, normally this is the sky. On a bright day just point at the brightest area of the sky that will be within the frame and adjust so that it's just below saturation. Then point at the subject and see what you have to determine if you need a fill flash to compensate for that. If it's a cloudy day I might set it a couple stops or more below saturation on the sky and then use the flash to illuminate the subject. Now you see why you need spot metering! You need to know what the brightest and darkest areas of the frame need individually. Cameras with matrix metering don't allow you to do this. Center weighted is better but spot is what you really want. This is the draw back to the new Canon 300D, it doesn't have spot metering but otherwise I think this should be a good low cost camera. To me, spot metering is critical, I wouldn't want to use a camera that doesn't have it. One more note on this, always meter the highlights so they do not over expose and if you can't use a fill flash, let the rest be dark. You can correct this to a large degree in Photoshop but areas that have been saturated can not be corrected.
8. White balance is something new the digital camera has brought to still photography. With 35 mm this could only be controlled by film type and or filters. With the digital, you have very good control over white balance at the touch of a button. A lot of people out there are running around just using this in the automatic mode not really understanding what it is but it's really quite simple. All it does is tells the camera what white looks like under the given conditions. So, the ideal way to use this requires having a reference white card but a lot of times you can find something in the setting to use that will be close enough. Let's say you are at some event and you are taking photo's under a yellow tent. The sunlight shinning through the yellow tent will be putting a yellow tint on all your subjects...ok, little unintentional play on words there so let's call it a yellow cast instead. All you need to do is tell the camera what white looks like under these conditions so if you point the camera at something white and set the white balance the camera will know to correct for this yellow cast. It doesn't know you are under a yellow tent, it just thinks you're crazy calling that yellow looking card white but never the less, it takes your word for it and adjust to make the yellow card it sees come out white. The nice thing is that by doing this, all the other colors are also corrected.
9. Shoot RAW! Shooting in the raw mode has a lot of advantages. In the case of my Fuji S2 this creates about 12.8 MB photo's so a 512 MB card can only hold about 39 photos but you get a lot of flexibility by doing this. Let's say you had a custom white balance setting on your camera for some really funky lighting conditions and you have forgotten about it. So now you are running around taking all sorts of really important photos using this incorrect white balance setting. Who cares! You're shooting raw! With raw you can really do a lot after the fact like change the white balance for example so shoot with the wrong settings all you want and just change it later. You can also change the exposure later so there really isn't too much to worry about there either. If you shoot using the camera's jpeg mode you lose the ability to do all this but you can certainly get a lot more shots on a memory card.
10. Photoshop. Yes it's expensive but so was the camera and so where the lenses so stop whining and go buy it. Photoshop can make a good photo look great and...for that matter it can also make a bad photo look great. It takes a while to learn to use it however but once you learn a few tricks using curves and channels etc you can really do a lot to recover improperly shot photos. Curves are non linear level controls that can be used for all sorts of lighting corrections and contrast enhancement. With channels you can use curves and all the other Photoshop features on individual color channels. By working with both a RGB and a CMYK version of the photo you can recreate a damaged channel in the RGB for example or create a less noisy version of a channel. You can also have far more success with sharpening by using Photoshop's "unsharp mask" on individual channels as opposed to simply using it on the composite. This software is just amazing! It's almost as cool as LspCAD and I have to tell you, that's pretty darn cool! If you have LspCAD then you know what I mean...you can't imagine designing a speaker cross-over without it. Photoshop is to photography what LspCAD is to cross-over design, you can't live without it once you try it.
The two shots below are just an example of what you can do. The original shot was intentionally under exposed and then corrected in Photoshop.
Click on a thumbnail for a larger view.
The sun was to my left and you can see the strip of
orange and yellow flowers on the left side shining slightly from the
sunlight in the original image. The red flowers in the bottom however were
shaded and almost disappear into the shadows. This area required a local
correction as did several areas within the trees and sky. Global
corrections were accomplished by applying "Curves" (non linear level
corrections) to individual color channels. In this case I created two
copies of the image and converted one from RGB to CMYK. This gave me 7
color channels to work with individually. Sharpening and contrast
corrections were done primarily in the K or black channel although some
contrast corrections were also done in select areas of the curve in all
channels. The corrected image suffers only
from my lack of knowledge and experience with Photoshop.
My Camera... http://www.ddisoftware.com/reviews/s2/
I chose the Fuji S2 Pro originally because it uses Nikon lenses. I assumed I could save the cost of buying lenses since it could use my existing lenses from my 35 mm days. Way wrong! My old lenses were all cheap lenses no where near the quality needed to go with this camera so of course I was forced to buy all new ones as follows...
Sigma Zoom Telephoto 70-200mm f/2.8
Personally I like the 2.8 aperture. A lot of photographers on the technical forums claim that typical lenses will be at it's sharpest some where in the middle of it's aperture range. Coming from the Photolithography side of semiconductor equipment, to me this seems to contradict lens theory. The lens should have it's highest resolution at it's widest aperture setting with the least depth of focus. I have to think some are mistaking a lack of depth of field with a lack of resolution. Anyway, I've found that all my lenses are very very sharp at their 2.8 aperture settings but the lack of depth of field is very obvious. Things just inches out of the aerial image plane loose sharpness rapidly.
I'm not sure if I will ever post any photo's here. Takes up too much space! If I ever get around to getting the camera mounted on a helmet and make some jumps with it then I might post some somewhere else and just put links here. Of course some of the speaker projects I'm working on now are being photographed by the S2 so those will be getting posted soon.