Digital Camera

[forgetvengance]

well i'm going to save up to get a great one so the budget will probebly be pretty high. I want a camera that will give me good pic quality and i can shoot in any light and not hav to worry about editing them later. I was kinda thinking about using one to take the pix at my wedding.That way i wouldn't hav to use a profecional photagrapher. just use little disposable cams for the ppl to take pix of us and i would hav a dig camera to take pix of them and any other thing i think would be important and i'd want to capture.

[Tim_axe]

Just remember that you only get one chance to capture your wedding. If you mess up with the random cameras, it doesn't matter how much money you saved on pictures. You don't get a second chance, so at least look at the "selecting a wedding photographer" guides that seem to come in the newspaper suppliments every summer and figure out what you want/need. Then compare photographers, talk to their clients and judge their satisfaction, etc.


For the average person, I wouldn't recommend a camera costing more than $350. Most of the people looking for cameras don't know how to use them, and the money goes to waste on good hardware. Also cameras that cost up to $600 aren't worth the extra cost for the features they offer. Good hardware, but it's plagued with the issues of being a compact digital camera. If you want to spend serious money and do serious photography in challenging conditions, prepare to spend a *lot* of money on SLR equipment.

To get an idea of the costs in SLR-land...one of our local papers recently bought a lens where the lens-hood alone costs $350. The lens is worth $4,000. And they still need to team it up with a $400 flash and $200 battery to get good pictures on our football fields. It is leaps and bounds better than any digital compact camera out there, but you pay out the butt for that performance. I'm kind of envious though since the body + lens + flash I used tonight didn't add up to the cost of their lens. If you compare our results, they're different, but both are of very good quality (the newspaper gets better shots...this is only my first season covering football). Most people can't justify the extra $4,000 for a small difference...but us SLR people do that a lot for low-light stuff...


Also some people need to stay away from digital cameras. So a $5 disposeable is probably better when they have weekly accidents than a $200+ digital camera... Though we still see photographers with $10,000+ of gear in each hand clobbered by football players on TV

[forgetvengance]

good idea. thanx.

[Katja]

Originally posted here by forgetvengance
well i'm going to save up to get a great one so the budget will probebly be pretty high. I want a camera that will give me good pic quality and i can shoot in any light and not hav to worry about editing them later. I was kinda thinking about using one to take the pix at my wedding.That way i wouldn't hav to use a profecional photagrapher. just use little disposable cams for the ppl to take pix of us and i would hav a dig camera to take pix of them and any other thing i think would be important and i'd want to capture.

You're going to have to photograph your own wedding?
You know a good idea? Buy a bunch of disposable camera's and divide them amongst the guests to let them take pictures. Tell them they have to return the cameras afterwards and then you'll end up with quite a lot of pictures.

Another thing to consider... If you want high-quality digital pictures then you'll need a camera with a lot of memory space. Preferably something that you can swap easily and a low price. I've mentioned the Sony Mavica already, didn't I? There's another version of it that uses small DVD disks that can hold 1 GB each, I think. Those small DVD's are pretty cheap so you can buy a big stack of them. One drawback though. Writing to DVD is slower than writing to a memory card.

Also remember to buy additional batteries for that camera. Especially when it's a day-long event you would like to be able to still take pictures near the end of the party when almost everyone is drunk and the most embarrassing moments can be captured for all eternity.

Keep in mind that at 5 megapixels, a single picture will be about 2 megabytes in diskspace. If you have 64 MB of memory in your camera, this means you'll only have 32 pictures at the end of the day. If you take an 8 megapixel camera or better then the pictures will become even bigger. About 3 or 4 megabytes per picture would not be an exception in that case.

The size of pictures also depend on the quality that you select for them, though. By choosing a lower quality or smaller resolution you will be able to make more pictures. But when you want the best, don't save on memory...

Also, many digital cameras also allow you to make short video movies. At a resolution of 640x480 for the video, a 1 GB memorystick will be able to hold 30 to 45 minutes of video. With 64 MB of space you'd be lucky to capture more than two minutes in a good quality.

And buying a very expensive camera just to capture a once-in-a-lifetime event could end up being a bit expensive. Try if you can just rent a high-quality digital just for this occasion. Otherwise you might end up with extremely expensive hardware with a thick layer of dust over it in 5 years...

Finally, you can use that camera during your wedding night but be careful with those pictures. If someone discovers them on your computer they might end up all over this world.