Digital Photography - Choosing a Camera

Michael Stewart: Hi! I am Michael Stewart. I am a commercial photographer and I am here showing you simple, digital photography. Right now, I am going to show you some digital cameras with different features they have. What to look for when you buying a digital camera and how to use these features?

Here we have your small point-and-shoot live-view camera. It has no view finder on it. Everything is live view on the screen. This is great for today's photography because there is view finders in these very small cameras are almost useless. You look through them. It is a very poor piece of glass. You can't really tell what your crop is or anything. But on a live-view sensor, you see exactly what you are looking at. The disadvantage of this camera here is that it only shoots jpeg files. We are going to talk about that in a later segment on file formats. But these are nice to have a with you all the time, small point-and-shoot. Going up from there, we are going to move to Prosumer type of camera. This is a range finder camera. It does have a good view finder on it. This is decent. You can also use it live-view just looking at the screen on the back. This camera has lots of manual settings. Film speed or sensitivity is on top. Your shutters and apertures can be set on the back. It also has the advantage that it can shoot a raw file. I really like this kind of Prosumer level camera because it is small enough that you will have it with you, if you would like. It does shoot a raw file, shoots 12 mega pixels which is a very big file and you can adjust it if you want. Or you can just put it on program and hand it to anybody to take a picture with. This is really nice to have.

Moving up from there to a larger camera. A single-lens reflex camera. This one you are going to look through the lens using a mirror. Okay. With the camera like this, you have an advantage of being able to change lenses at a flash on to it and it has a larger size sensor. Everything is bigger. That is a big difference in the camera because the bigger the chip and the bigger the lens, the better the resolution at any mega pixels. So those are few of the basic features to look for in cameras. Next, we are going to talk about file formats.