Re: Advice on what digital camera set-up to buy?

Posted by Joseph Earl On 2012/8/5 0:15:05

Steve, I come from a professional photographer family; my dad was a portrait photographer, he started his studio in 1947 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Needless to say, I grew up in a darkroom. My brother took over the business after my dad died in 1985, and just closed the studio a year ago, although he still does photography.

I switched to a DSLR about ten years ago, choosing an Olympus E-1. I still use this as my main camera, even though there are two more generations since the original. My brother was reluctant to switch, buying his first DLSR in 2009. He started with an Olympus 620, and progressed to an E-5 shortly thereafter. This is now his main camera.

I like the Olympus mainly because of the four-thirds format. This gives a perfect image ratio that translates into an eight by ten, sixteen by twenty, and so on, without any loss of image due to cropping. The other format, adopted by Canon, Nikon, and others is the same as a 35mm film image, which is more rectangular. As an artist, I prefer the four thirds format. It's kind of like the VHS-Beta format battle that went on when videotapes came out. The only reason we have the 35mm format is that it was adopted from 35mm movie film, which was a standard at the time. The digital camera is not limited by these constraints, and Olympus, Leica, and some others decided to use a more perfect sized CCD for image capture.

Of course, all of this is useless information if you don't need the flexibility of different lenses and focal lengths. You just need an inexpensive point and shoot camera. So my recommendation would be an inexpensive Olympus, or really any other brand for that matter.

Another interesting development is the improvement of image capturing ability in most smart phones today. Personally, I could get by and actually prefer to use my iPhone 4 for most of my images that I post online. If you go to my blog, you will see nothing but iPhone images. I always have it with me, it automatically streams my images to my MacBook Pro, and it makes for some surprisingly good images!