PROFOTO FORUM

This is for the person who is just starting out in photography and confused as to which camera to purchase.  The first thing that you must decide is what you want to accomplish, what your goal is?  Do you want to just create photos for your personal album, are you thinking about pursuing this as a hobby or do you want to become a photographer? For this post I will exclusively discuss only digital cameras.  I will leave film cameras for a later date.

canon sd970 point and shoot camera

If you want to just have some nice photos for your family album and you’re one a budget, consider a point and shoot camera.  It is simple to use and very compact so that you can take it with you in your pocket.   This allows you to conveniently capture just about any moment you wish to preserve without having to learn a lot of technical settings of more advanced cameras.  The quality of your photos will not be the best, but for a photo album it is more than adequate.  The newer point and shoot cameras now have great advanced feature such as facial recognition, video, etc.  This also gives you flexibility to capture the moment on video as well.  However, if you are looking for higher quality and you’re not a budget or you are thinking about making photography a serious pursuit then there are plenty of DSLRs you can choose from.

Canon 5d mkII and Canon Rebel xti

DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex camera.  These types of cameras use a mirror positioned behind the camera lens to direct light toward the viewfinder when you’re composing a photo. When you release the shutter, the mirror swings quickly out of the way, letting light from the lens travel straight to the sensor and momentarily blacking out the viewfinder. The viewfinder in an SLR incorporates a prism–usually a pentaprism–that flips the incoming image around so that you can see it right side up and bounces it onto the focusing screen where you see it.

The SLR design allows one camera to accommodate a very wide range of lens focal lengths, and that’s the biggest reason that SLRs dominate serious photography. The explanation? With a non-SLR camera, you have to match the angle of view of the “taking” lens with that of the “viewing” lens. That’s easy with a fixed lens or a short-range zoom, but it requires increasingly complex and expensive viewfinder mechanisms as you try to cover a wider range of focal lengths. With an SLR, you avoid this problem because the taking and viewing lens are one and the same.

Most dSLR models beyond entry-level models incorporate a Live View mode, which allows the photographer to use the LCD to compose shots the same way they can with a snapshot camera. The most basic implementations generally lock up the mirror, with the prism diverting the image to a small sensor that feeds through to the LCD rather than to the capture sensor. This does tend to hurt performance, however. Early versions required that you focus manually when in Live View mode, but current models use contrast autofocus.

As you can see, the biggest differences between the two types would be flexibility, cost, convenience, and quality.  If you have decided to purchase a DSLR then you should read the next article regarding what type of DSLR you need.  If you need a nice quality point-and-shoot then check out the product review section.  I will post some reviews of the point-and-shoot cameras that I have or have had.  I am a camera junky and have owned many types of cameras.