Adventures in DSLR
I recently decided to go away from the Point and Shoot phase of my life, where I was keen on the Canon Digital Elphs. The smallest with good quality was my desire. I had a vision of constantly taking my camera with me to snap pictures.
The reality, unfortunately, is that with any compact camera, you have to sacrifice the ability to take good quality pictures. Don't get me wrong, they're great for just cataloging memories. However, it's extremely rare to be able to shoot the dramatic style pictures that I so craved to take.
I started researching my purchase a while ago, periodically checking in on things. A month ago, I was torn between a Nikon D60 and a Canon XSi, both at a similar price point. On twitter, I got some good feedback that Nikon was the way to go. I started reading more in-depth about the D60, and stumbled across this statement on Ken Rockwell's excellent site:
The Nikon D60 is a "sucker" camera sold mostly to people who are not professional photographers, but who are impressed by meaningless megapixels. Megapixels have nothing to do with picture quality. The less expensive D40 is the same thing as the D60, but better. The D40 is the professional's vacation camera. It's what I take when I'm on vacation or with family, too.
How could I reconcile downgrading from a 12.1 MP point and shoot to a 6.1 MP Nikon D40? Flickr.
Flickr has an excellent feature: it allows you to search by camera. I searched by D40 and D60, and zoomed in on the pictures that people had posted the originals of. I was stunned. The quality of the D40 is excellent. Considering I rarely print pictures, and when I do I rarely print larger than 4x6, 6.1MP is fine. More impressive, however, is that when I look at the image actual size, it's nearly perfect -- very little noise. This is a drastic change from my point and shoot.
So, I decided to do it. I put a Nikon D40 search into Craigslist and subscribed to the RSS. Last Thursday, a hit came up: a used camera for $350, a full $120 under the retail price. I had to check it out, and I'm glad I did. It was in perfect condition. Basically, the seller was a college student who took a beginner's photography course, and decided he didn't use the camera after the class enough to justify holding onto it.
Within hours of getting home, my wife took Cocoa outside to play frisbee. I decided to put the camera to its first test. The results are spectacular to me. The thing that impressed me most is that with my point and shoot, capturing high motion subjects is very hard. With this, throw it into continuous mode and just snap away. I took about 150 pictures over the course of 10 minutes. Nearly every one turned out good, leaving me with the hard choice of picking out a unique set of "bests" to post to Flickr. Here's my results:
Later that evening, I took the camera to a local Meetup group for active dogs in Austin, and I got some more great pictures.
I still have a lot to learn, but I now am no longer being limited by the camera itself, and it's a wonderful feeling. If you've been thinking of going DSLR, it's totally worth it!
Discuss | Posted on Sunday, August 31, 2008, in photography
