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Originally Posted by Konovalov
I am looking to upgrade from my compact point and shoot digital camera to a good beginners digital SLR.
This is one area that I am pretty much cluesless as to where to start.  |
1. The first thing you need to understand is that your lenses are
far, far, far, far, far more important than the actual camera body. If you buy good lenses, any camera will turn out decent.
2. Secondary after the lenses, you need to understand the "cropping" factor. A frame of 35mm film is about 35mm across, 24mm vertical. The typical CCD sensor is 24 across, 16 vertical. This is like taking a large picture and "cropping" out just the center portion. You're not enlarging it, you're not changing that center portion digitally. You're just cutting out around that section, meaning that everything else around it is missing.
This means that when you buy a lens, they are going to be marked for standard 35mm film and you'll need to adjust for it. The human eye (depending on which article you read) "sees" at about a 50mm lens. This translates into a 35mm lens when you're using a 24x16mm CCD sensor.
Don't worry if you don't understand this issue immediately. It will make itself known as you use the camera and you will learn to adjust for it. What I'm saying is don't run out and buy lenses which "overlap" in their functionality because you'll be wasting money when you do it. You need to spend some time researching the lenses and understand what to use when, before you start buying lots of different lenses.
3. There are four main categories. "Macro", "wide-angle", "near-field", "telephoto". Macro is for when you want to take extreme closeups from ~5cm away. Wide-angle is when you want to capture as much.....
area in the photo that you possibly can, such as when you're trying to take a picture of a bunch of people standing together -- portraits. Near-field is usually some kind of limited telephoto lens and is the most "general purpose" lens that you can have. Something like a 18x85mm lens would fit this category. Telephoto is generally anything above 100mm, but don't bother with a telephoto lens less than 200mm focal.
4. There are "fast" lenses and "slow" ones. I feel these are slightly counter-intuitive descriptions, but they are accurate enough. A fast lens has a lot of light gathering ability, due to a
very large aperture. Fast lenses are those huge honking 20kg looking lenses that you see complete psychopaths carring around to sporting events or in secret agent films. Think back to whatever massive lens you've seen in a movie, and that was a "fast" lens. They normally cost out the anus of a baby hippopotamus ($1500-2400). Slow lenses are cheaper than this. Fast lenses give fast exposure times in restricted light conditions. At sunset, if you're trying to capture one of your children running across the soccer field, you're going to need a 1/400 second exposure time (or less, usually less [1/800]) and a "fast" lens will let you do this. A "slow" lens would need 1/200, causing the picture to be blurry. Your compact camera has a "slow" lens of f4 or above at the wide-angle.
5. Good macros start at $400. Same for telephoto. Wide-angles run $200, with image-stabilization available toward $400. Near-field lenses are the ones that you want to take when you're going to be slogging it out in nasty conditions. I keep a few different ones, with one really good one ($400, I.S.) and a couple "bang around" ones ($130).
6. Decent SLR's start at $600. Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji all have different mounts. A Nikon lens won't fit on a Canon, and vice-versa. Look through several different camera bodies and decide on some kind of price range, then start looking at lenses that fit those various cameras. Don't buy
anything until you've got both your lenses and camera body picked out.
7. Memory cards are another issue. You'll want a memory card reader to get the thing on your computer. I recommend getting one of the portable hard drives (~40GB) and two or three medium size cards. If one card goes out on you, you'll have a spare, and you can "burn" them off to hard drive as you fill the card.
8. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is the new thing for digitals. They are very nice to take for scenic pictures, especially when you're travelling. Some cameras will do "bracketing" and some won't. You'll need bracketing for HDR, and you'll need to pay the extra ($1000+) to do more than groups of 3 (3 is the minimum for HDR).
9. I have an older Canon Rebel XT (8MP). It's very good. There are certainly better cameras, but it is versatile and the controls are highly functional. I also have a portable hard disk and two 4GB flash cards. I bought the extra battery pack which allows me to use 2 LiON batteries in parallel, or 6-AA NiMH batteries in series.