Camera buying guide

Camera buying guide

in this article I will briefly touch every aspect of the camera and photograph to help you understand the choice you will make before buying a camera
Nowadays photography has engulfed all the aspect of our lives. We all use this process which became so widespread that it's almost used in any circumstances. No wounder a photograph is worth a thousands words as now the new-world revolutions are based and documented by a huge cluster of immense libraries of photographs of different kind and subject. The lens has been incorporated in our everyday-use devices starting with the cellphone which we carry all the time, there was an air of amazement in the time when a camera was introduced to the cellphone and with it came my negativeness towards those kind of cameras.

First of all what is a camera?

Think of a camera as a magic box with which you could capture a moment part of reality. This moment can be 1/1000 of a second or it can be 60 seconds but the reality is a very different story. In fact THE reality, in my point of view, is a very objective way to think about a photograph.  you can't fit all the reality in one little photograph, you can't communicate a 3D environment as it is into a 2D format photograph thus comes the sparkle of the photograph's job  to communicate either the real reality or his own reality. 

So we have broken the photograph into 2 styles: the reality and the photograph's reality. My personal style is my reality and I'm seeking the goal of reaching a level of style that is the equivalent  of a watermark but finding your style is a very long process in which you must practice and try many kind of photographs from nature to people, from sports to still life etc... but what about the camera itself ? what camera do I need ? in my personal experience I started with a basic point & shoot and ended up with semi-pro DSLR. This transition was essential for me as I soaked all the potential of my P&S and I was ready for a DSLR.

Here comes the pain staking process of choosing the right camera for you. Basically you 2 kinds of cameras:

Firstly, the Point and Shoot

Secondly, the Bridge

Thirdly, the Digital Single Lens Reflex or DSLR

The P&S is very compact and lightweight and you can even fit it in your pocket.

The bridge is a little bigger and fits a huge zoom lens most of the time up to 40X

The DSLR which can be of various sizes and weights ranging from 300 grams to 1 kilo

A new Hybrid was introduced these couple of years and was the Mirroless camera

The mirroless camera is an excellent hybrid between the DSLR and the P&S

Next comes the biggest marketing catch the megapixel, so what is the megapixel Story ?

Pixels are the smallest picture element and the smallest points that capture light on the sensor. More pixels allow you to capture more detail up to a point. The more pixel you have the bigger the print out picture you get but the density of the megapixels comes at a price as the more megapixels are packed on a sensor the more you have Noise the harder your sensor struggles with tone and color capture.

So 4 words emerged that you hardly think of :  Tone, Color, Noise, Sensor,

Let's start with Tone and color story :

Hue is the color. Saturation is the purity/intensity of the color. Tone is the degree of lightness and darkness.

To illustrate the hue I chose to show you a photo from www.facebook.com/westcoastscapes

notice the orange colors of the top trees, then the green a little more down, then the blue a little way further so this is practically a mixed hue photograph. If somebody shows you a photo of a glass of milk and the photo look like everything in red, even the shadows are a little reddish well the hue of the photograph is predominantly red. A good mix across all the hues insure a better replicate of the reality (if you chose to communicate the real reality and not your own)

Here are all the aspects of the hue of a photograph you can control.

The tone is the degree of lightness and darkness of a photograph expressed by a curve divided in Highlights, Lights, Darks, Shadows. The photo is mixed toned and made of all these 4 components. the highlights and lights are the most lit part of the photo and the darks and shadows are the opposite side. controlling the curve that links the 4 can change the look of the photograph, with it you can leave the highlights and make disappear the shadows or make the shadows almost as detailed as the highlights.

In short here is the curve and you may notice that the photo has practically no highlights (there's no gray area in the leftmost of the X axis). You can adjust the curve as it pleases you so the photo may look real or maybe surreal..but this is a different chapter.

The camera Sensor is the equivalent of the film, as a rule of thumb the bigger the sensor the better quality of your photos the less noise you will have. There is different sizes of sensors :

The bigger the sensor, the bigger  image you will get :

Simply adding pixels can mean that you’ll have a decrease in image quality even though you have more megapixels in the camera.A high-quality 10-megapixel sensor can outperform a high-megapixel sensor that simply has too many pixels crammed into its surface.

The noise are these little dots that are visible only when you zoom into your photograph. like so:

The less noise you have the better the photograph, the noise is the best quality too look for in a camera, the best camera is the camera that makes the least noisy photos. The noise is the result of hypersensitivity in some areas in the sensor due the light that come to the sensor, the more sensitive the sensor to the light, the better you can photograph at night without flash and without tripod but on the down side the sensitivity pops out the details and the flaws that are translated into noise.Think of it like the static that you see on your TV, the more you boost your more sensitivity the more static hence noise you'll see. The dark parts of the photo are the least noisy but the lit part is another story ,you can check in the photo above .

The Sensitivity is governed by a variable that is the ISO, the higher the ISO the better the sensitivity the higher the noise. This is a small part of the story of the photograph which is a chapter of its own but in short a photograph is made up from 3 variables in the camera : ISO, Shutter Speed, Aperture

Causes of noise:
It’s a fact of life that the smaller the sensor, the more noise there is for a given capture size. This is because amplifying a signal also amplifies signal distortion. (The smaller the sensor, the more the capture needs to be
blown up, or “amplified.”)
Other causes of noise:
• The sensor and camera’s processing software: This varies by manufacturer.
• The ISO setting: The higher the ISO, the more noise there will be.
• The size of the image: The greater the blow-up from the native capture size, the more noise will be apparent.
• Exposure time: Exposures that are longer than about five seconds can become quite noisy.
• Underexposure: Underexposed areas tend to have more noise.

In other words You must should choose the camera that has the least noise in its images hence the best low light capabilities and a high dynamic range.

 Aperture is the opening in the lens and translates the amount of light that passes through the opening, the bigger the aperture the more you have this blur effect in the photos called the Depth Of field or DOF, the smaller the aperture the sharper your photos are.
 Shutter speed is the amount of time the curtain in front of the sensor is open, the longer its open the more the sensor is subject to light the brighter the photo, but bear in mind that shutter speed longer than 1/100 will make your photos blurry (motion blur) if you don't have steady hands. Here's the triangle of photography that summarize the story a bit:

 I guess the megapixel myth is now behind.

Let's think practical: What camera is right for you ?

What you want it for ?

there's a mix of uses with and to a camera that are dived in these sections:

1. price
2. mobility, size, weight, compactness
3. Quality of  a photograph: sharpness, colors, tones, noise, sensor size
4. Control over a photograph

One thing is clear, until now there's no camera that has everything so you must compromise a quality over another and a research that will take only a little of your time is needed before you buy a camera. The two best sites I found that helped me the most to chose my camera are :

1. dpreview.com
2. snapsort.com

The first site is very professional and dissects the components of the camera, this site is for the OCD people or the Geek style.

The second offers a friendly interface that helps you select your camera based on your needs, this site is the very best and gives you a wide variety of choices based on type, brand, price, size, lens, screen, movie quality, low light performance, image quality, shutter speed and more

 I will begin in the field of my concern which is medicine. Sometimes you have interesting cases or interesting operations to perform but a bulky DSLR cannot enter the OR room or the bulky DSLR is to heavy to carry around and to annoying but at the same time you need the best possible image quality so you can publish the case online or in a magazine or simply show the case to your fellows, a good looking professional image reflects the concern you have taken into sharing your experience.The best choice for you is the mirroless hybrid camera.

If you're on a tight budget and need a means of taking photos that are better than your phone and please note that any camera is better than the phone camera, the phone camera is the best way to rapidly share photographs that are of LAME quality. Here there's no question your camera is a Point and Shoot

If you're on a trip and you don't have any experience whatsoever in photography so you have two choices based on budget. If budget is not a problem a DSLR with a good lens preferably a 18-105mm , you can always shoot in Auto-mode and with time you will learn the other features, of course you can take courses that clearly overpriced and are for the lazy people, you can always read a little book or two on the subject ,make your own assignments and get out there experiencing the potentials of your camera. if budget is a little tight or you don't wanna bother with what lens to choose you can always get a Bridge

in the end, if you have a clear objective in your mind of taking beautiful photographs that require full control of every aspect of the photograph including ISO, Aperture  Shutter speed or you feel that your point and shoot or bridge isn't getting the composition you got in mind because of its performance, the DSLR is your end choice. Of course here comes the big bucks, as photography is a very expensive hobby. So always look for the bigger sensor for the best price, the best lens for the sharpest image. 

Remember that the camera wont take an image and make it beautiful, it is only a tool and if you use it right in a certain way any camera can take the best photos of the world but of course a DSLR is the best choice out there to imprint your style as a watermark.

2K12 Review

This year was my head-start, If you follow the photos especially in the nature album here or the flowers album here , you will notice my style was mutating along. This was due to the numerous books I've read about photography and simply browsing through photos of iconic photographers.

The key was to held on to an inspiration and get out everything you can out of it, therefore I will share in this post my many tricky shots I made throughout this year.

Autumun Amalgam

This shot was one of my favorites, it was done after the rain. You may notice this reflection, some people where always asking me where the hell I did found this lake, well to be honest it's a pure illusion, it's no lake it's only a leftover of the rain on the reservoir on my house. The shot was made using a tripod because I wanted the maximum sharpness out of the composition. I then used adobe raw to turn the photo into my artist's vision that was the result u see. I'm totally against NO-photomanipulation because it doesn't transcend what an artist feel, I sure I'm not a professional artirst but I may have my style and my point of view, I wanted to trick your mind and I did it, the end justifies the means so if you know how to use photoshop don't hesitate using it ! just to be clear this was edited using Adobe photoshop Raw, all of my photos are shot in RAW, think of Adobe RAW as a darkroom.

"Andreas Feininger, a LIFE photographer from the peak times of that magazine, once said that the “uncontrolled photo is a lie.” This was over 50 years ago, well before Photoshop

Feininger also recognized that you could manipulate the image in such a way as to make it lie quite well. The point was not whether you try to control the image, but how you control that image. He wasn’t talking about manipulating an image the way that some photographers use Photoshop to totally change an image. He was talking about how photographers use the unique processes of photography to get the most from our images and help us express what we really see and feel about the world around us" - Book : From snapshots to great shots : Lanscape by Forrest Harper

I totally understand what he meant and I'm making sure I'm fooling your senses for the only pleasure to know that you have stared at a photo at least for 30 seconds :)

Dramatic sunset Helios

As you may notice form the camera's configuration there's no way I could capture the foreground in a sunset with a 1/2000 shutter speed.Well here comes the magic of HDR, but this was not pure HDR it was an HDRish effect using Adobe RAW to reveal the dark details of the foreground.

The problem is that the camera doesn't see what your eye sees! The human eye is the ultimate camera as it may alter the amount of light filtered through the pupil add the strong processing of the brain and you are sure not to miss a detail in a scene. The challenge of photography is to communicate what to see and the original photograph was clearly not the only thing I saw in the composition hence the photo manipulation to break free the details leaving in emphasize the dramatic sunset.

Timelapsy

This will be one of the first photos of its kind. it was pretty tricky, it's made from 350 photos stacked and blended in light mode in photoshop. I got this feather liek effect, the technique is hard and the prediction of the result is even harder...A new challenge for 2013.. maybe 2014

Splash n' Blue

Having fun on the poolside was pretty fruitful. This composition was not made by accident as I manually focused from a defined height on the final bowl destination, gone up 1 meter, held the bowl in contact with my lens and finally dropped it.. I've made the same thing over and over again till i got everything in focus. I Increased the clarity and the warmth in Adobe RAW and this is what I got ! Experimenting was the key because the world is full of hidden wounder and my job is to seek them and use them to my advantage so I can fool your senses ;)

Refill ?

This shot was the fruit of the poolside fun, how did I have the idea to shot the process of emptying a bottle in the pool was let's say pure luck. I was playing around throwing the bottle in an out the pool when I had enough I wanted to throw it but before that I wanted to empty the water into the pool and while doing so it hit me ! I asked my mother to hold down the  bottle and me I made the  shot ! Particularly refreshing shot that ended up on many phone wallpapers.

The summer Autumn transition

One of my favorite shots that illustrated the handshake of the Summer season with the Autumn season. This was a particularly hard shot in term of ergonomics. The plant was under a balcony which was 2.5 meters high so I had to somewhat find an elaborate way to crouch so I could have everything in a straight line. As you may notice 3 focus point on this photograph, the plant, the sky and the contrast between the sky and balcony. The photo was made geek style because its origins were the rule of thirds. The only thing I did to the photo is to shorten the balcony a bit to center it out just to perfect the geek style.

Season Discrepancies

Needless to say I have some unfinished business ! This is what I could accomplish given my thight schedule! I really hope I can achieve my project in 2013 :-) Update : AND I DID :D

Macro, Grass Shots

Made in the beginning of February 2013, got me some recognition on Viewbug.com; It was early in the morning, after the rain at sunrise. Perfect set of material to work with. I just got down and started shotting in full manual because focus is so hard to achieve because of the million details that I had that day. In the end I made some pretty magnificient shots that some of my friends though that were Built-in the Windows 8 wallpapers.

Astro Nights

As you may have noticed the camera's configuration differed a lot between the two first and the last shot, the first two were shots of the moon which gives away a lot of light so the darkness may actually fool the meter of the camera so Manual settings were a must. In the last photo the baffling ISO 4000 was used with a f/3.5 aperture and a 20 seconds shutter speed were used to capture the most out of the night sky especially the shot was designed for the Milky Way ! I'm looking forward to acquire the Nikon D7100 so I can pump up the ISO without worrying too much for the noise! who knows maybe in March 2013. Update : nope not a chance im in August 2013 and still same old D5000 ! 

La pointe

This was my one of the most viewed shots on facebook. I simply kept shooting till I got what I wanted of course photoshop helped a lop especially with the focus . The colors were harmonic especially with the indian music style. I had lots of fun capturing this moment! It was the beginning of people's photography ! 

Zambia's Best

My zambia trip was my major turning point in my photography evolution. in 37 Gib of material I figured where were my flaws and tried to solve them. I upgraded my current skills and from here my never ending loop of mutation has started, you can visit the full album here or you can check out my blog for more info.

Meanwhile happy 2013 year and may it be beyond our dreams and expectations.

Sincerely yours Mhamad "Vlad" Chaddad

Don't forget to visit my page www.facebook.com/thechaddedphotography