A brief intro to digital cameras and selecting the right model

When comes to digital photography in todays media rich age, we have diverse choices in the selection of types of cameras.  These choices provides different levels of photo quality, versatility, and form factors that fills the need for various shooting events across varying price ranges.  With almost unlimited camera selection options, it could sometimes be confusing or overwhelming to select the right camera for a particular event or a general purpose for diverse needs.  Therefore I will introduce some camera basics to familiarize with determining the right camera as well as a general overview of different cameras for different events.

First off, there are 2 main classifications of a digital camera, The digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) and the Point and Shoot.

Digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLR) use a mirror to direct light from the lens through an optical viewfinder to a large sensors, anywhere from 18mm to 36mm.  This large sensor allows for best in class low light performance, and yields a greater depth of field that really allows rich array of colors with instant shutter picture taking.  DSLRs allow for interchangeable lenses for use of different lenses and filters for different photo subjects.  Brand names include Nikon, Canon and Sony that can range from $899-$1699 to well over a few thousand dollars and are typically used by professionals.

 

 

A Point and Shoot camera has a fixed lens and are the most popular and easy to use digital cameras for the average user.  These cameras generally pack less sophisticated sensors than DSLRs which results in reduced image quality and latency before the picture is taken.  There are many different model classifications of point and shoot cameras from pocket-compact to mid-range to high-end prosumer and even Mini-SLR’s Super Zoom from companies Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Samsung, Olympus, and Fuji.  These different classes have different form factors(as their names suggest) that make them more convenient and portable than DSLRs.

When shopping for digital camera, you should focus on under what conditions the camera shall mainly be used for.  Like for travel, you may want to consider a travel camera with a large zoom, rugged case, geotagging and common replaceable batteries.

While for concert going or social gatherings, you may want a compact camera that can easily fit in your pocket and has good low light performance.

When trying to select or narrow down the right camera, you need to familiarize yourself with the camera specs and do some comparisons.  The specs you should familiarize yourself is megapixel, aperture and optical zoom.  However, you must also look at different features of different camera manufactures and models.  A camera is only as good as the user taking the picture and a lot of new cameras are coming with features that help you take great pictures for simple point and shoot to added manual controls for when you are able to evolve as a better photographer.

Finally, always remember these 3 points:

1. Don’t get hung up on making sure you’ve got the “best” camera or best camera in a particular class.
2. There is no spec that tells you which camera is best. A higher resolution (i.e., more megapixels) or bigger zoom range doesn’t make the camera better
3. Try before you buy.  Make sure you can take good pictures and try it out in various picture taking conditions.  make sure if fits well in your hand, tryout the menus and if gives you the picture taking flexibility you are looking for based on your experience.

The best camera you have is the one in your hand at the time of capturing the pictures.

DSLR Image Quality Basics

ISO & Noise

ISO numbers follow a common scale on all digital SLR cameras:

100

200

400

800

1600

3200

6400

12800

The higher the ISO number, the faster the camera sensor absorbs light.  So, Increasing the ISO setting on your digital camera is most frequently used when you’re taking photos in dim light.

General rules for using ISO

• The most common ISO camera speed settings are: 100, 200, 400 and 800.
• Use an ISO of 100 or 200 when taking photographs outside in sunny conditions.
• If the sky is overcast or it is evening time, then use an ISO within the range of 400 to 800.
• Night time or in cases of low light you might need to set your digital camera ISO to 1600 if photographing moving subjects like people or if you are hand holding the camea. The result may be a grainy / noisy image.
• When taking landscape night shots,  and using a much lower ISO with a longer exposure, its recommended that you use a tripod.

Pixel Count, Bigger is not Better

The pixel count in digital cameras has an impact on image quality.  This is due to the actual physical size of the sensor of the camera.  So How Many Pixels Are Enough?  Well, many amateur photographers believe that cameras in the 10-12 megapixel range is an enough for most purposes

Sensor size, Bigger is Better

Most DSLRs have one of two sensor sizes in them: a full frame sensor, equivalent to a 35mm negative, or a smaller sensor, often referred to as a cropped sensor.  The effect these sensor sizes have on the image quality relates to image noise and dynamic range.  Larger sensors also have larger pixels, giving them the potential to produce lower image noise and increase the dynamic range of the picture.  Dynamic range refers to the range of color tones the sensor can capture.

Exposure

Exposure is the amount of light that travels through the lens to the digital sensor that will affect the image quality.  The amount of light is controlled in two ways, aperture and shutter speed.

The aperture is the circular opening in your lens that you can make smaller or larger to allow for more or less light.

The aperture settings for a lens are called f/stops.  The smallest number like f/2.8 are the largest opending of the lens.  Each time you change the settings to the next larger number, the opeing in the lens gets smaller and lets in half as much light.

Aperture also controls depth of field, which is how blurry you photos background and foreground will look compared to what you are focusing on.

If you use a large lens opening, your background will be blurry(f/2.8, shallow depth of field).  If you use a small opening(larger f/stop of f/32), the background will be less blurry.

The shutter speed determines how long the shutter stays open, allowing more exposed light to hit the sensor.  The lower the shutter speed, the more light will be exposed to the camera, for example shutter speed of 1 will expose the sensor to 1 second of light.

Each increment of shutter speed will change the shutter exposure time a factor of 2.

   A fast shutter speed will freeze the motion of the picture.  But if you use a slow shutter speed, you get blurry motion.

There is a relation ship between aperture and shutter speed in if you have a slow shutter speed then you need a larger opening, and vice versa.  While many cameras have auto-exposure programs, under certain conditions those programs will not always provide the correct setting.  If an image is under- or over-exposed too much, the picture will not be usable.

Lens Quality

The lens you select will affect composition and image quality as well.  Before the light from your picture appears on the digital sensor, it has to travel through a number of glass elements inside the lens.  Using cheaper lenses can effect on the quality of your photos.  Cheaper lenses may result in poor autofocus or have chromatic aberrations – a purple fringing in your photos.  They may also have difficulty with maintaining perspective on walls.

Digital Processors

DSLRs are as much computers as they are cameras.  And, like computers, the digital processors contained in them can have a significant impact on image quality.  The current Canon processor is the DIGIC 4 (Digital Imaging Core).  It boasts quicker processing time compared to the DIGIC 3, but more importantly it has improved noise reduction in high-ISO images.  The most recent DSLR to use the DIGIG 4 is the Canon 7D, which has a maximum ISO setting of 12,800.

Simple Photography Tips for Beginners

Digital Film Photography is allowing us to become better pictures takers because we get instant feedback with the quality of our shots. Gone are the days when you took a picture, had to finish the film role, take the film to get processed and wait a few days to get the pictures back. By the time you actually had the pictures back for review, you may not remember the settings or shooting conditions under which it was taken, good or bad. Today, we get instant review via the LCD which is almost standard in all digital cameras. If you took a bad picture, then you have a chance to retake, no waste of film.

This trial and error allows us to experiment to be more creative. These following simple trial and error tips can be used with any camera and will help you to improve your photos with no technical knowledge required.

1. Composition

Composition consist of essentially three things:

1. What you keep in the frame
2. What you leave out
3. Where you put things that are in the frame.

While the first two items  are fairly straightforward, the third is a bit trickier.  When we first start taking pictures, we tend to just put our subject in the center.  This is fine, but it also gets boring, quickly.

Our brains naturally break things down into patterns and having things slightly off-center is appealing to us.  In photography, this type of picture composing is called the “Rule of Thirds”. Basically, you need to cut the frame up into thirds horizontally and vertically, to get something that looks like this:

Place the center of your subject on one of the four points where the lines cross  for a nicely balanced composition. Why does this look better to us? Most cameras have a menu option for displaying a grid on the screen so you can quickly and easily put your subjects on the point.

2. Perspective

When taking picture of animals or children, take it from how they may view the world around them.  WE all know how the world looks between five and six feet off the ground.

      

A beginner only needs to know one thing: experiment.  Get lower, get higher, get directly above your subject, or directly below them.  Zoom in on your subject, zoom out and show how your subject fits in the world around you.

The beauty of digital photography is that you can constantly experiment.  Stand in one place with a zoom lens and you can see the world in a hundred different ways.  Stand in a park and you can turn left and see one landscape, or turn right and see another.  You can get lower and see things from a bug’s view, or aim downward and take a picture of your shoes.  Always try to think up a new way to see what’s around you.

3. Focus

When you’re trying to capture something in a photo, you want that subject to be in focus so the details are crisp. On a smartphone this is easy; you just tap whatever it is you’re trying to shoot on the screen. For other cameras it can be a little more complicated, but typically speaking if your camera has a physical shutter button, you can focus by holding the button halfway down. When the camera thinks it’s locked in it’ll usually surround the subject in a green box of some sort and give a cheerful beep indicating everything’s good to take the picture. Press the button the rest of the way and you’ve got an in-focus photo.

While there are lots of advanced things you can do with selective focus, for starters just concentrate on getting what you want in focus. With software these days you can fix nearly any problem you may have with a shot, but you can’t fix focus. That said, here are some simple things to keep in mind:

1. With landscapes you usually want everything in focus, which the camera sometimes doesn’t understand. Most cameras have a “landscape” scene mode for just these occasions.
2. When capturing portraits of people or animals, it’s best to focus on the eyes above all else. They’re the windows to the soul, after all.

4. Light

Lighting affecting pictures to different degrees based on the source.  Specifically, you want to find situations where light is dramatic.  The best time to do this is during something called the “golden hour.” The golden hour is simply the hour right around dawn and right before sunset.

It’s named this for the beautiful golden color the sun often takes on at these times of day.
The golden hour is also important because it tends to create really wonderful shadows. While at noon shadows tend to be nonexistent because the sun is directly above you, at sunrise/sunset the sun is low. This low angle naturally creates shadows. That interplay between bright and dark areas is called contrast, and it tends to drastically improve the look of your shots. experiment with some time during the golden hour and you’ll instantly see just how quickly the changing light will improve your photos.

4. Exposure

AS what reviewed in the earlier blog, different camera settings affect how light and shutter times effect the photo quality.  Controlling this range is very simple to do and can be a powerful way to change the character of your photo.

   

The easiest way to do this is with your camera’s “exposure compensation” button, which is always signified with a +/- symbol. It might be a dedicated dial, a button on the camera, or an option in the menu. Whenever you shoot in an automatic mode on a camera, it tries to figure out how bright the scene should be.

Have a sky that’s way too bright? Slide that sucker towards the negative. Trying to brighten up an area in the shadows? Move it to the plus side. Experiment with it until you get the idea.

The Birth of the Camera Phone

The advent of the camera phone started in Japan in the year 2000.   It cost $500 and produced 110,000 pixel images (0.1MP).

Sprint brought the Sanyo 5300 to the US market in November 2002.  It cost $400 and it featured a chunky clamshell design. With a 0.3-megapixel capability, it could capture shots at 640 x 480 pixels. The one pictured on the right was taken from this camera phone.

 

By the end of 2003, camera phones were really taking off in the U.S. and over 80 million had already been sold worldwide.  Then in 2004, Sony Ericsson released the S700 with a 1.3MP CCD Camera, with Nokia, Motorola and Samsung followed suit with their own models.

This was the birth of the Camera phone in the US and shortly after started its spread across our market.  These Phones had a basic flash, white balance control, self-timer, digital zoom, and various filter effects like sepia, black and white, and negative colors.  By  2006, 460 million cellphones with cameras were sold.

It was not until Apple introduced the iPhone did digital camera really increased their dominance as the most popular camera as can be seen from this infographic..

Today, the camera phone has seen many improvements over the past few generations.

Things have certainly come a long way since the very first Camera phone in terms of functionality, image quality and detail, and to offer some perspective on just how much the smartphone has advanced in six years and through six generations, The following is a pieced together a very interesting comparison.

However, the iPhone is not the best camera phone on the market.  The Nokia Lumia 1020 based on its picture quality is set to be the best camera phone on the market for some time to come.

So, the smartphone competition has heated up not for merits on its voice quality, but for its phone capturing capability.

Taking Picure with SmartPhone

A smartphone camera is convenient camera that you people usually have on them plus it is very easy to take a picure.  It can bse used for when you have an unexpected moment.

Therefore, it’s a good that we take some time in learning the basics and take advantage of some of the features that will help you take better pictures with your smarthone.

Different Smartphones have different features

iPhone camera options

 

Android camera options

New Iphone 7 IOS

Focusing

touch a specific area of the screen to focus the camera. When you do this, the iPhone will also adjust the exposure, so that the focal point of your photo will always look good.

Zooming

On the iPhone, use the the zoom slider by using pinching your 2 fingers.  

On an Android phone you can tap the plus (+) andminus (-) buttons.

Scene Modes

Scene modes are a great way to take better photos in specific situations. For example, the Landscape, Sports,Night Portrait, and Close-up/Macro modes are each tailored to different situations. Some smartphones allow you to select scene modes. For example, Android phones allow you to tap the right side of the screen to access scene modes (as well as other options).

Selecting Android phone scene mode

 

New IOS 7 Scene Mode

 

Other Features

Some smartphones have additional features that you can use to take better photos. Here are a few features that your phone may have:

• Grid: The iPhone can display a rule of thirds grid on the screen to help you compose your photo.
• HDR (High Dynamic Range): This mode helps to capture more detail in the shadows and highlights of your photos. Only use it when your subject isn’t moving.
• Flash:  to help you take low-light photos.
• Effects: Some smartphones allow you to apply effects to your photos, which can include black and white,tinted, or vintage filters. On Android phones, you can tap the right side of the screen to access the effects.
• Front-facing camera: The iPhone has a second camera just above the screen. This makes it easier to take selfies.
• Panorama: 

Final Basics

If you want to take pictures with your IPad this is how you will look.