Next time I promise to answer the commenters who have asked me to talk about how I take photos that look not so sucky. Instead of that, today I want to talk about the one wrong answer to that question: spending days and a couple of mortgage payments hunting down the most expensive and high-speced gear*. Unless you have a Holga with a cracked lens the best thing to do is master basic skills with a camera that you already feel comfortable with, and then upgrade in a modest way when you run into a specific task that you want to do, that you know how to do but cannot get done with whatever you currently have. Most of the time once you fully understand what photo you want to take (great pics are almost all planned and then shot) you will most likely have figured out how to do it using what you have.
However, if new and shiny gear is your thing, I have news for you. Forget the 36-megapixel D800E. That will only barely resolve the split ends on uncle Frank’s nose hair. The new toy offers a ridunkulous 980 megapixels. If that does not make those midday sun direct-flash vacation pics ‘pop’ then nothing will.
And no, this is not a gigapan-like robot that snaps a whole lot of pics with one camera and then stitches them together. Well, it sort of does, but instead of moving the camera around they just welded 98 digicam sensors in a semicircle around one wide-angle (11mm equivalent) lens, rather like the ridiculous Metal Storm device does with bullets.
The downside? It’s only a prototype and the prototype weighs more than 200 pounds. But hey, if you can lift a D3…
(*) For the small number of people for whom that is the right answer: instead of yelling at me in the comments, get back to work. Clients don’t pay you to read a stupid blog.
dmsilev
Heh.
I also like this from the actual paper: “Ubiquitous gigapixel cameras may transform the central challenge of photography from the question of where to point the camera to that of how to mine the data.”
Ansel Adams wept.
Edit: Also, too, for the paranoid: “AWARE-2 includes 98 microcameras, each with a 14-megapixel sensor. It was constructed as part of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency AWARE programme.”
different-church-lady
Oh pishaw… my first VCR weighed more than that….
Amir Khalid
O father of Max!
Linky appears to be bad. Please to fix?
Roger Moore
Nice to see a reasonable, moderate stance like that. It’s far too common to see people take a categorical stance at one extreme or the other. I’d make a minor exception, which is that you should feel fine about buying fancy gear if your real hobby is camera collecting rather than photography. I think there are a fair number of people who really fit into that category but don’t want to admit it.
I’d also say that the picture you take because your camera is with you is much better than the picture you don’t take because the ultra-fancy gear you bought is too heavy and/or valuable to bring with you. I dearly love my SLR and pro-grade lenses, but they are too damn heavy to take with me everywhere, so I wind up using them only when I’m planning ahead. I wind up taking a surprising number of pictures with my camera phone just because that’s the one I have handy.
Also, too, thread needs more kitteh.
catclub
@Roger Moore: Gorgeous black kitty. Ours was a little more stout by the end, and also had a white stripe about three hairs wide across her ribcage.
Other than that, very similar.
jeffreyw
@Roger Moore:
Indeed
RP
That looks a lot like the core of an atomic bomb.
halteclere
My brother has been in the thick of the development of this camera for the past couple years.
J.W. Hamner
Yeah it’s funny how often people have the initial reaction “I don’t have the gear to take that shot” whenever they see a great picture. I initially thought the same thing when I started exploring HDR photography a month or so ago, thinking I would need some $6000 camera to automatically bracket 7 exposures or whatever… but then I learned that basically every camera on earth (including your phone) will bracket 3 exposures, and if you need to do more you can do it by hand (on a tripod)… or buy a $330 remote that will bracket as many exposures as you want.
And in what I have more experience in… food photography… you could eliminate 95% of the bad photos out there by turning off the flash, putting up a couple of $10 lights, and using a tripod. I use a more expensive flash I can bounce simply because it’s quicker and easier (though notably less precise).
Though I do think there is a big step up from a cheap point and shoot or your cell phone camera to a DSLR.
Schlemizel
to me megapixels are over-rated. Unless you are doing something really unusual what is out there is plenty good enough. To me the big key to happiness is shutter speed. Nothing is more frustrating than lining up a great shot, hitting the button and having something in frame change before the snap. Really need a DSLR to cure that though
mapaghimagsik
Wow, two photo nerds in a row, yay.
I’m still working on basic skills, like lighting, composition, and getting to know my equipment really well. you can get really, really far with just 8 megapixel, getting some lovely 12×18 shots.
Tim F.
@Schlemizel: It sounds like your problem is shutter lag, the delay between actuating the shutter button and capturing the image, rather than shutter speed. Yes, digicams often have terrible shutter lag. If that is a problem then try to manually prefocus, or else activate that option through a menu command. Some newer digicams have very little shutter lag but yes, that is an area where a little but more camera will pay off.
However, $600 or so ought to be enough. Very few cameras that cost more than that have any lag issues, including the latest generation of contrast-detect mirrorless cams. Early mirroless cameras could be pretty bad though.
Gin & Tonic
Sounds like a Rockwell disciple. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.
McWaffle
All they need now is to cool the thing enough to enable video capture, a storage system capable of housing a huge quantity of data, and a computer system capable of doing near-real-time analysis and… well, a gamechanger, no doubt.
BGK
The best thing about the pixel-peepers – at least the ones on DPreview – is that whenever Canon or Nikon release their latest “prosumer” DSLR bodies (which still happens at a pretty absurd rate), whole crowds flock to the fainting couches and dump their gear at fire-sale prices. Canon came out with the 30D so quickly after the 20D that I was able to pick up a barely-used one for less than half of what it cost new. The shutter release sticks sometimes, but mine’s still plugging away after nearly eight years.
Also too I always take pains when carrying my DSLR and get stopped by someone asking my help in taking a family picture with a point-and-shoot, and they’re inevitably apologetic about how awful their camera is compared to mine, to tell them that it’s about the photographer, not the gear.
Jamie
Right on.
For folks wanting to move to an SLR, think used. The first one I got was the Canon Digital Rebel, which is still a very respectable camera. I spent nearly $1k on it new (I forget what it was, but with a spare battery and memory cards, what’s what it came to), you can get it used for less than $300 now. If it has been taken care of, it is still a great camera. I’ve shot over 15k photos on mine, and it is going strong. I’m sure the same is roughly true for Nikon folks.
As for technique, get used to the interplay of aperture, ISO and shutter speed. For just snapping shots, you want an intuitive feel for the interrelation based on available light. Some day when you have time, stage a scene by a window that gets sun and start snapping. Shoot at variations of all three and see what comes out as the light changes. Pay attention to what the scene looks like to your eye, and compare with what comes out. Think of this as sort of like doing scales on a piano or guitar.
jayboat
@Schlemizel:
Only if you aren’t printing anything over 11×14. When I’m running a 60″ print it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to know those babies are in there.
Love your threads, Tim- always informative.
Joel
I get pretty decent photos with my Panasonic DMC-FZ35. One of those semi-DSLR types that has packs some pretty good power. When I don’t get said photos, it’s usually me. It’s also tough to get photos of interesting things because I’m always with my wife and it’s kind of hard to spend hours, or even minutes, framing a shot when you’re with someone else.
Ohmmade
Ive been a semi pro photographer for about a decade and I can say with certainty the best photos in my book were never planned and a full frame body makes all the difference in the world.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
You should. Ken Rockwell is nice to read when you’re just getting started and need somebody to talk you out of splurging on incredibly expensive gear, but he’s incapable of grasping either subtlety or that not everybody has his interests or style. If you’re at all experienced, you’ll see most of his stuff as somewhere between overstated and a big joke.
mapaghimagsik
Rockwell does not care about your style. Now give him $5.