Need a new camera

[agentsteel53]

great review of DSLRs, F1!

a few random points ...

Replace this with a wider diameter (usually between 52-58mm) lens with specially-coated glass and you get a much finer image. Things like glare can still occur, but causes far less image distortion.

another form of distortion to look out for is barrel and pincushion effects, which are much less pronounced in the higher-quality lenses.  Some compacts - at widest zoom out, you may as well have a fisheye.

Did I also mention motor drive...3-5 shots per second on even the cheapest DSLRs, which is nice from a moving vehicle (although it eats your battery life).

that is my modus operandi - take 5 photos, figuring one will be at the right distance and in focus.  

for me, battery life has never been an issue - I've noticed that even in my worst modes (a combination of rapid-fire repeated daytime shots, and long exposures at night), I get a good two days shooting (600-1500 photos) out of a single battery charge on the SLR.

5) Lenses are interchangeable; typically, a 20-year-old EOS lens works with any Canon DSLR, for example. Not sure about Nikon, but I imagine it's the same as they're in constant competition with each other.

I'm a Nikon guy so hopefully I can answer a few questions accurately here.

Canon's EOS system was invented in 1985.  everything after then is - as far as I know! - compatible with everything else after then.  Everything before then, incompatible, but I believe a few hackers have built a few adapter rings that will get you bare minimal functionality (manual focus, manual exposure).  Good if you want to get a really esoteric 1970s Canon lens for a shot that you absolutely need to make, but for all practical purposes, if you are looking to get into Canon, it is the post-1985 (and, really, post-2003-or-so given the leaps and bounds of technical advances in lens design) world which you will be concerned with.

Nikon's F mount came about in 1959.  Everything is physically compatible with everything else from that point on, but some of the electronics are not compatible.  I to this day cannot keep track of non-AI, AI, AI-s, AF, AF-S, AF-G, and the various other permutations of lens electronics, but I do know these several basic facts:

AI is an old standard, and no lenses of this style have been made since the early 90s or so.  It refers to an automatic metering system, in which the lens can electronically communicate with the camera the amount of light it is receiving, so that the camera tells you the appropriate exposure settings.

(so, by default, a non-AI lens has, I believe, absolutely no electronics.  Completely manual focus, exposure, etc.)

AF is Autofocus, but it only means that the lens is compatible electronically with an autofocus camera.  It may or may not actually autofocus on your camera body.

several of the lower-end Nikon cameras, like the D40 and D5000 (which is my current camera body) do not have an autofocus motor as part of the camera body.  In order for autofocus to work, you need a motor in either the body or the lens.  So, for these lower-end Nikon SLRs, you will need a motor in the lens.  

I believe that the AF-S lenses will offer this option, but the terms are so confusing and bloviated by the marketroids that it is very helpful to do a google search on a lens you are thinking of buying, especially in the realm of D40 compatibility.  (D40 is Nikon's flagship consumer DSLR, so people that review lenses will tend to note whether or not it has various features when mounted to the D40.)

here is an overview of Nikon lens standards since the introduction of the F mount in 1959.  You read it and remember it, as I am too lazy!

I just know that:

* my Nikon 18-200 is autofocus
* my Nikon 50mm f/1.8 is not auto focus (hah, manual focus at f/1.8 depth, yeah that's fun)
* my Nikon 10.5mm fisheye is, if I recall correctly, not autofocus, but since it is a fisheye, you can rotate the focus to "looks about right" and you will be okay, especially if you reduce your aperture from f/2.8.  Seriously, at f/8, your photos will be identical on a fisheye whether set to distance infinity or distance 5 meters.  Within 5 meters, I trust you can gauge the distance just fine.
* my Tokina 12-24mm is autofocus, if I recall correctly - but, again, at that wide angles, and such apertures (widest is f/4, I usually shoot f/8), you can manually focus and get great shots.

those are the four lenses I use.  Other lenses, you can ask me and I may or may not know.  Google is your friend

one note regarding lenses... image stabilization (Canon is IS; Nikon calls it vibration reduction or VR - it is the exact same idea) is a miracle.  I have taken a 1-second exposure, at full zoom (200mm) using my 18-200 VR of a lunar eclipse, and had it come out completely sharp to better than the constraints of the CCD and the lens itself.

the rule of thumb is - for N millimeters (based on the old film 35mm standard, also applicable to digital cameras), expose no slower than 1/N seconds.  VR adds at least four stops to that standard, and, with judicious use (read: take 100 photos and pray that one comes out), nine stops.  That is a fantastic achievement by our species.  

so, especially for road warriors, I must note that a VR lens is the greatest item in your arsenal - especially if you are intending to be shooting at high zoom factors, while driving at freeway speeds, under suboptimal light conditions.  I can even get green guide signs at night with the VR lens.  Not retroreflective ones, mind you - non-reflective porcelain ones, illuminated by shitty 60W bulbs.

1)  You're buying into a lens system, essentially. If you want more lenses, like telephotos, fisheyes, tilt-and-shifts and other gadgets like polarizers (essential for shooting pictures through a windshield on a sunny day, also good at reducing glare in many other cases like bulb exposures, glass reflections, adding contrast),

indeed, contrast improvement is a noted feature of a polarizer lens - especially for skies!  It is one of the few filter tricks that cannot be duplicated in Photoshop after the fact; at least not without exquisite manual labor.

and yes, it makes sense to buy an SLR of a given brand based not on the camera itself, but on the lenses which that manufacturer provides.  I went with Nikon simply because of their 18-200 lens, which has been my workhorse since the day I bought it.  I have shot 97% of my photos with it.  

(that other 3% has been well worth the investment in 3 other lenses!)

Unlike guns, you can practice shooting with them before you pay.

off topic, but any firearms dealer looking to keep you as a customer will let you put six shots into a paper target before you commit to buying.  

3) Buy a spare battery! You can't just get replacements at a gas station, so you have to keep it charged and ready. Not cheap, but you'll be glad you had it at 10am in a new place when the other one gave out. Usually, you can get 500-700 shots on a single battery charge.

I second this wholeheartedly.  When I got my D5000, my first purchase was a second battery that is the correct form factor.  (My old camera, a D50, was different.)  I love the ability to hot-swap when I am out a half-mile hike from my car and my battery has decided to expire.

on that note, invest in a car DC-AC inverter by which you can keep your batteries perpetually charged!  

You'll also want photo-editing software and a good image browser that doesn't suck.

oh yes.  pick up Photoshop Elements - or, if you are hardcore, pick up CS5 if you can think of a concrete reason why Elements does not have a feature that is essential to you.  

Photoshop gives you two advantages.

first - it lets you take away much of the processing concerns at the time that you are taking your photos.  Instead of worrying about having to get it exactly right, as it comes off the camera, you just know that you need to get close enough and small details can be hammered out in the post-production.  Fix it later - keep shooting now.  

There is a learning curve towards understanding what can, and what cannot, be fixed in photoshop - for example, if you're out of focus, you (unless you have a PhD in signal processing and spent your postdoc years at JPL) will not be able to restore focus.  But, off by a stop of exposure?  Totally wrong white balance?  Rotated 3 degrees from the optimal?  Totally can be corrected, days later, out of the field, when that perfect sunset is just a memory.  It really helps to note that you don't have to fumble away the perfect ten seconds of light because you're attempting to zero in to within one-third of a stop of the correct exposure interval.

second - it gives you a complete extra dimension to your creative skills.  For example, I use the Panotools fisheye-to-rectilinear plugin and get myself extra-extra-wide rectilinear shots from my fisheye lens.  

for those "purists" that think of Photoshop as something for the weak to rely on because they do not take photos right the first time ... let me note Ansel Adams's "The Tetons and the Snake River" (the greatest photo I've ever seen).  That photo was taken in 1942.  The print that you see there, the staple of dorm room interior decoration?  1969.  Ansel was constantly re-working his printmaking techniques as technology improved.  He died in 1984.  If he had Photoshop, he would've used the everloving shit out of it.

It is beyond the scope of this post to note how digital cameras are different from how the human eye perceives light, color, setting, perspective, and space (and well the fuck beyond the post to attempt to describe how the human mind understands all of those things) - just note that digital cameras, by an artifact of CCD designs, tend to slant green in low-light conditions, so those dramatic purples and oranges of the sunset must be coaxed back into the actual JPEG in front of you by, at the very least, going into "Levels" in Photoshop and setting the green channel's middle slider to 0.90.  

Remember what you saw, what you experienced - bend the digital capture towards that recollection as is necessary.

[realjd]

Canon's EOS system was invented in 1985.  everything after then is - as far as I know! - compatible with everything else after then.  Everything before then, incompatible, but I believe a few hackers have built a few adapter rings that will get you bare minimal functionality (manual focus, manual exposure).  Good if you want to get a really esoteric 1970s Canon lens for a shot that you absolutely need to make, but for all practical purposes, if you are looking to get into Canon, it is the post-1985 (and, really, post-2003-or-so given the leaps and bounds of technical advances in lens design) world which you will be concerned with.

Almost. There are actually two EOS lens standards now. They introduced a new lens standard for their cameras with the smaller APS-C image sensors. Due to the geometry of the cameras, they are able to put the rear element of the lens closer to the image sensor. This lets them make wide-angle lenses much more compact. They can't be used on older film SLR cameras or the high end DSLR cameras with a 35mm sensor because the larger mirror would smash into the back of the lens. You can use a regular EF lens on all camera bodies, but the EF-S will only work on APS-C.

But I'm assuming at his price point, he'll be getting one of the Canon cameras with the APS-C sensor size so he can take any Canon EOS lens.

for those "purists" that think of Photoshop as something for the weak to rely on because they do not take photos right the first time ...

I started doing b&w photography in the 90's with an actual darkroom. There were a LOT of tricks you could do when printing. I don't see Photoshop as anything other than the digital equivalent of spending a few hours in the darkroom trying to get the perfect print, only it takes less time and you don't waste expensive photo paper.

I love Photoshop personally, but other free tools like the GIMP and Paint.NET can get the job done as well. GIMP is just as powerful as the full Photoshop versions with an (arguably) crappy and difficult interface. It's open source. Paint.NET has a great interface and is very usable but isn't as powerful. Think of it as a free equivalent of Photoshop Elements.

[Ian]

I bought my Nikon D3000 this past December and I love it! One thing I like about it is that it is able to take fairly good photos in the rain. For example, here are some rainy shots I've taken...

[agentsteel53]

Almost. There are actually two EOS lens standards now. They introduced a new lens standard for their cameras with the smaller APS-C image sensors. Due to the geometry of the cameras, they are able to put the rear element of the lens closer to the image sensor. This lets them make wide-angle lenses much more compact. They can't be used on older film SLR cameras or the high end DSLR cameras with a 35mm sensor because the larger mirror would smash into the back of the lens. You can use a regular ES lens on an APS-C camera.

But I'm assuming at his price point, he'll be getting one of the Canon cameras with the APS-C sensor size so he can take any Canon EOS lens.

now this I did not know.  I don't follow Canon as closely as Nikon.

I started doing b&w photography in the 90's with an actual darkroom. There were a LOT of tricks you could do when printing. I don't see Photoshop as anything other than the digital equivalent of spending a few hours in the darkroom trying to get the perfect print, only it takes less time and you don't waste expensive photo paper.

you should see what Stalin's henchmen could do in a darkroom! 

I love Photoshop personally, but other free tools like the GIMP and Paint.NET can get the job done as well. GIMP is just as powerful as the full Photoshop versions with an (arguably) crappy and difficult interface. It's open source. Paint.NET has a great interface and is very usable but isn't as powerful. Think of it as a free equivalent of Photoshop Elements.

I've never used paint.net, but I agree that the Gimp's interface is utterly flawed.  It's like they were attempting to avoid a "look and feel" lawsuit by purposely mapping every common Photoshop keyboard shortcut to a different key.  I'm sure if you used only the Gimp, you'd get used to it quickly, but to alternate between both is an exquisite headache.

[DeaconG]

Almost. There are actually two EOS lens standards now. They introduced a new lens standard for their cameras with the smaller APS-C image sensors. Due to the geometry of the cameras, they are able to put the rear element of the lens closer to the image sensor. This lets them make wide-angle lenses much more compact. They can't be used on older film SLR cameras or the high end DSLR cameras with a 35mm sensor because the larger mirror would smash into the back of the lens. You can use a regular ES lens on an APS-C camera.

But I'm assuming at his price point, he'll be getting one of the Canon cameras with the APS-C sensor size so he can take any Canon EOS lens.

The regular EF lenses work on all Canon DSLR bodies.  The EF-S is designed for crop only-you cannot physically mount that lens onto a full frame body (although there have been a couple of crazy people that modified a 10-22 to work with a FF camera, but ended up with HEAVY vignetting).

[Scott5114]

I've never used paint.net, but I agree that the Gimp's interface is utterly flawed.  It's like they were attempting to avoid a "look and feel" lawsuit by purposely mapping every common Photoshop keyboard shortcut to a different key.  I'm sure if you used only the Gimp, you'd get used to it quickly, but to alternate between both is an exquisite headache.

The reason Gimp is so different from Photoshop isn't necessarily an intentional attempt to be different. Rather, it's a consequence of its environment–late 90's Linux. Back then the Linux people still had little idea of how GUIs worked since traditionally Unix was the land of character-cell terminals and nothing else. GNOME and KDE were brand new. Plus, when assigning shortcuts people tend to go with what is perceived to be familiar to the users–and at that time it wasn't Photoshop, it was Emacs. Emacs makes a lot of strange choices as viewed by the modern day computer user–cut and paste are Ctrl+K and Ctrl+Y respectively (instead of "cut" and "paste" you "kill" and "yank"), and I'm sure there are still a few legacy programs out there that still use these after everyone else standardized on the Windows/Mac standard of Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V for these. Gimp probably drew inspiration for its shortcuts from Emacs and other Linux programs (most of which are probably long dead) that the developers thought the users might be familiar with. (And keep in mind, late-90s-Linux-users are a far different crowd from what you'd expect the clientele for a Ps-like program to be.)

That said, Gimp gets a lot more comfortable on Linux/X11–it is simple to segregate all of its various windows and toolboxes on one virtual desktop to prevent other apps from getting their windows wedged into the mix. Most window managers allow windows to snap to one another as well, making it rather simple to create a functional UI for Gimp (especially if you consolidate all the tabs and dialogs and stuff down to just a few by means of dragging all the tabs into one window). If you're used to Photoshop though it's probably not worth the hassle unless for whatever reason you find yourself being unable to procure Photoshop.

[agentsteel53]

I use emacs but have never quite noticed the resemblance.

then again, I am not an emacs power user.  I have never written Lisp for it, nor do I have any idea how to invoke Eliza.  Also, I tend to accidentally run into features by mistyping a shortcut.

the worst-mapped feature in emacs is "ctrl+backspace" which, to the untrained eye is "randomly make block of text disappear".  It's actually "delete to mark", but if you are pressing the shortcut because you have not yet taken your finger off ctrl from a previous shortcut, and intend a single backspace to be what you are pressing, you will be surprised at the result.

luckily, there is an undo feature, which is conveniently mapped to ctrl+shift+hyphen, which apparently is a pun on the word "underscore" (thanks, Richard Stallman).  Don't ever hit ctrl+z, because that's "make window vanish into oblivion because your window manager sucks".

[WillWeaverRVA]

The discussion above is why I shoot with Pentax versus Canon and Nikon. (everything since the advent of the K-mount in the early 1970s will work on any modern Pentax DSLR, with a few easy to work around restrictions in some cases)

[agentsteel53]

The discussion above is why I shoot with Pentax versus Canon and Nikon. (everything since the advent of the K-mount in the early 1970s will work on any modern Pentax DSLR, with a few easy to work around restrictions in some cases)

what Pentax lenses from the early 70s are worth converting to the platform for?

as mentioned before, the reason I chose Nikon, when getting into the SLR market, was because their 18-200 lens was completely unique and unmatched by any other manufacturer. 

[DeaconG]

The discussion above is why I shoot with Pentax versus Canon and Nikon. (everything since the advent of the K-mount in the early 1970s will work on any modern Pentax DSLR, with a few easy to work around restrictions in some cases)

what Pentax lenses from the early 70s are worth converting to the platform for?

as mentioned before, the reason I chose Nikon, when getting into the SLR market, was because their 18-200 lens was completely unique and unmatched by any other manufacturer. 

I think he meant the fact that Pentax hasn't changed their lens mount, while both Canon and Nikon have in the last 20 years (Canon went from FD to EF, then split off the EF-S variant).

[WillWeaverRVA]

Pentax's lens mount hasn't changed much at all in the last 40 years. Also, Pentax's old lenses from the 1970s are perfectly capable of taking excellent pictures - even the original K and M series lenses work great (with stop-down metering). The A series was the first with automatic aperture control, and doesn't require stop-down metering. The Pentax-A 50mm f/1.4 is legendary.

As for modern lenses, Pentax glass is excellent, costs less than the other brands' lenses, and has some good third-party support (mostly from Sigma and Tamron). If I'd gone with Nikon like I originally planned or remained with Olympus (whose system has too many limitations, IMO), I wouldn't have been able to afford to upgrade much beyond the initial kit lens.

I still use a Canon if I need a compact, though, the PowerShot SX120 IS (since replaced with the SX130 IS) is amazing for the value, focuses lightning fast for a compact, and is packed with features. It's an excellent roadgeeking camera if I don't feel like taking a DSLR.

[Truvelo]

I bought my Nikon D3000 this past December and I love it! One thing I like about it is that it is able to take fairly good photos in the rain...

I normally don't take pictures in the rain because the pictures come out poor but in the example below I was impressed with the result.

I find the best weather for pictures out the windshield is bright overcast. This means driving towards the sun doesn't cause signs to be silhouettes and it also isn't too dark that pictures come out blurred without cranking up the ISO.

[DeaconG]

So did the OP get his camera?

Inquiring minds want to know!

[corco]

OP is still rounding up the funds for camera purchase- hopefully in a couple weeks I'll get one

[DeaconG]

OP is still rounding up the funds for camera purchase- hopefully in a couple weeks I'll get one

Well, I'm sure you'll enjoy whatever you choose to get your hands on.  I've been going nuts since my Canon 5D Mark 2 + 24-105 arrived-it's worse than a kid being turned loose in a candy store!
Of course, there's a smoking hole in the ground where my credit card was...

[corco]

OP went ahead and bought the Woot deal today- a refurbished Panasonic DMC-ZS6 with Leica lens for $140

[rickmastfan67]

OP went ahead and bought the Woot deal today- a refurbished Panasonic DMC-ZS6 with Leica lens for $140

I happen to have the next step up model of this camera, the DMC-ZS7.

It will take time to get use to the manual features.  However, I have gotten some good night pictures while in motion.  The only problem is that I have to brighting the crap out of them if I ever want to post them.

[mightyace]

And, as mentioned before, I've got the ZS5.  I think you'll like it!

I like the fast on-off time.  But, I've found the hard way that if you let it go to "sleep," it takes longer to wake up than if you turn if off and back on again!