Buying a digital SLR

[thristian]

As mentioned previously, my trusty ol' mega-zoom all-in-one camera got nicked while I was on holiday, and now I'm in the process of choosing a replacement. My first thought was to find the latest revision of my old camera and buy that, but it turns out to have some serious chromatic aberration issues, and I'd rather not mess with that. Also, it's

Comments

[thaths]

Depth-of-field is a razor-sharp tool, to be wielded carefully: on my old camera, I had to fight to create a shallow depth-of-field, but on the DSLRs I've played with, depth-of-field effects keep showing up un-asked for (some more than others, of course). Definitely something to keep an eye on.

DoF is more of a feature of the lens than of the camera body. I would strongly recommend you include a 50mm (or 35mm) f/1.8 (or f/2) prime lens in your shopping basket. They are cheap (USD $100) and will give you great bokeh.

Also, spend less on the body and more on the lenses. After all, a camera body's main function is to be a light-proof black box. Most of the nice stuff is on the lens.

Another thing to keep in mind when moving from P&S to DSLR is that you should get into the habit of shooting in raw format and doing post processing (using Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture or similar).

[thristian]

DoF may be more controlled by the lens than the camera body, but my understanding is that increased sensor-size gives you more opportunity for DoF - and any SLR with even a kit lens has more DoF-potential than my old point-and-shoot.

That said, I am keeping my eye on 50mm prime lenses, either for when I buy my camera, or as an easy and comparatively cheap answer to "what do you want for Christmas this year". :)

I may experiment a little with RAW, but as I don't have access to Lightroom, Aperture or Photoshop and the Linux equivalent is kind of scary, I expect I'll be sticking mostly with JPEG - I'm led to believe the differences between a good JPEG and RAW are fairly minor anyway.

[thristian]

@virtualwolf: As for your Curl Curl/Barrenjoey shots, I wish I'd managed to take some of those. ;)

[madradish]

SLRs are great and can take wonderful photos (I love mine) but are also loads less portable.

You might want to consider taking a look at the Canon PowerShot SX10 IS. I know a few people who have gotten this recently and it looks like a great camera. 20x zoom, lots of manual functionality and you'll probably get nearly as good ISO controls as an SLR (possibly better than a non Canon SLR ;)

If you are serious about getting an SLR, it's probably worth putting more research into lens choice rather than body. Avoid kit lenses and if you want a telephoto, do consider getting IS. It's worth the extra $$. I'd add another vote for the 50mm 1.8 lens, they are great in low light and for extreme DOF.

Oh and if you don't have the noise ninja plugin for photoshop I highly recommend you get it. It's the most wonderful thing for noise elimination that I've seen...

[earthnative]

> Doesn't include a video-mode or live-view, features I never use and don't particularly feel like paying for.

Be careful you're not arguing 'never use' for the wrong reason. Afterall:

> With a compact camera, I set it to ISO100 when I got it and never changed that setting ever again

...you never used to use ISO settings either... (and having played with the video mode on all-in-ones before, I wouldn't have used them either. otoh, the video mode in the Canon 5DmkII is pretty droolworthy, and if the 500Ds video mode is similar, I'd say you'd want to be DAMN sure you wont use it before writing it off as an expensive and meaningless feature...

[thristian]

On the other hand, I've frequently thought "man, I wish I had more usable ISO levels", but I've never thought "man, I wish I could take a moving picture" - or rather, I'm trying to figure out how to capture the scenes around me in a still photograph, and video-mode kind of misses the point. For that matter, I can't remember the last time I took a photo of a moving object, except to try and get pretty tail-light trails :)

[earthnative]

yes, I thought of that rebuttal when I wrote it. And it's a fair rebuttal, only if it's still valid after consideration, and not a kneejerk 'obvious rebuttal to justify my original position'[13]

video mode not so much misses the point, as is a related, but separate point. Some people want to play with both points (me), and some find one or the other only is their target.

I'm just making sure you run self-diagnostics on your own targets here, nothing more :)

[13] I have caught myself doing this in the past :/