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| *SoulEyes Photography>>>Child Photographer |
What i sthe differnece between a point and shoot camera and digital camera, which is best for quality and? |
taking pics of children? I don't know alot about camera's so I would appriciate description when answering the question instead of "photographer terms" Just try to educate me the best you can. Thankyou! Hello, There are acutually a few different types of cameras. A point and shoot is the easiest way to take pictures. It is a camera that literally does all the guess work for you. Most have different settings on the camera so you can dial in the type of picture you want, ie: portrait, landscape, sports or closeup. You dial in the type and the camera chooses the correct settings. In portrait mode the camera slightly blurrs the background so the subject "pops" in the picture. In landscape mode everything will be in focus. In sports mode the camera will "freeze" the action. In closeup mode you will be able to do some macro photography. These cameras come in two types: film and digital. Mostly digital now. The dirrerence in film and digital is obvious. With digital you can take hundreds of pictures at a time (depending on the size of your memory card),review each one and delete the ones you don't like. You can download them directly to your computer or take the memory card to almost any store to have prints made. If you are looking for a digital point and shoot, get one with a lot of megapixels (at least 5) and with optical zoom instead of digital zoom (never use digital zoom!). Optical zoom actually adjusts the lense. The reason this is important is because if you make a very large print and have used the digital zoom (instead of optical zoom) you will be able to see the individual pixels in the print. The print will look "fuzzy". Donna most cameras sold today are point and shoot digital cameras, one in the same, the point and shoot class comes from the automatic settings, where you only have to push the shutter button and the camera dose the rest (focus, shutter speed, and all the other good stuff you don't want to deal with.) all you realy need to worry about is the number of megapixels, (the number of colored dots that make up the photo) if someone trys to sell you a camera with less than 4 megapixels just walk away, but 4- 5 would be good for a starter camera my suggestion go to yahoo shopping digital cameras digital camera GUIDE be sure to check titles on the left side the guide should answer your questions in simple terms a piont and shoot camera is basic, all you need to do is point the camera and shoot (take a pic). Where as the other sort of cameras have more things on them that may complicate you in many ways. so because you said that you dont know much about photography buy a point and shoot !!! hope this helps and always remember to have fun ! experienced photographer First, some definitions to help you get educated: "Point and shoot" cameras are the kind where you just point them at the thing you want to take a picture of, and push the button. No focusing, no fiddling, no adjustments -- just "hey, that looks neat! CLICK" "Digital cameras" use computer technology to take the picture, instead of film. With a digital camera you can see the picture immediately, you can copy it to your computer, you can email it to Uncle Ira and Aunt Petunia, and more. With a film camera, you have to have the film developed and printed before you can look at the pictures. However, some film cameras are so inexpensive that they're basically given away free -- you can often pick up "single-use cameras" at the supermarket checkstand. So there are digital cameras that are "point and shoot," and there are also film cameras that are "point and shoot." So what kind of a camera ISN'T "point and shoot"? In some ways, it's any camera that lets you adjust SOMETHING to make the picture better, or at least different, than it would be with a point-and-shoot camera. Let's start with the easiest example: zoom. Zoom means that you can make an adjustment on the camera that makes it look like you've moved closer to -- or "zoomed in on" -- the thing you're taking a picture of. Imagine you're at Disneyland with the kids and they're riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds. With a point-and-shoot camera, you might take a picture where there are two teeny blobs of color that represent your kids, because you have to stand 30 feet back from the bobsled where it splashes down coming off the mountain. But with a zoom camera, you fiddle with it and suddenly the picture looks like you're only standing TEN feet away, and their faces are in nice detail with the water splash and everything. You're standing in the same place -- but the zoom uses something sort of like a telescope to make the objects in the picture look closer. (You can also "zoom out," of course, so if you're standing close to the kids, you make the camera zoom in the other direction to get a picture of Sleeping Beauty's Castle behind them, without having to walk all the way across the park to get it.) Beyond that, here are some words and ideas you should know before you start shopping for a camera (because you will hear or see them once you start looking): MEGAPIXELS: In the world of digital cameras, "pixels" are the dots that each picture is made up of. If you've ever done needlepoint, a pixel is like one stitch on the needlepoint canvas; a megapixel is a million of these stitches. If you have only a few megapixels, the resulting picture will look "jagged" and not smooth. In general, more megapixels is better (though they usually increase the price of the camera). So if you're looking at a pair of cameras and one has 4.2 megapixels while the other has 6.1, the 6.1-megapixel camera will probably take better-looking pictures. FOCUS: How sharp, crisp, or clear the picture is. Most "point and shoot" cameras are made to focus reasonably well on everything from a few inches away from the camera to the top of a mountain 50 miles away. More advanced cameras have adjustments (most of them automatic, these days) that allow you to be the most perfectly focused on one specific distance from the lens, with things closer and farther being "out of focus." (For an example of how this works, hold your hand in front of your face, at arm's length, and concentrate on your fingers. Then, without moving your head or your eyes, concentrate on the wall across the room. Did your hand get blurry? That's because your eyes changed their focus. Some cameras can do the same thing.) Now, why would you want to do this? It can look cool. For an example of this, here's a photo my son took on a walk through the forest near our home: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lightningch... SHUTTER SPEED: In the old days, cameras took pictures by letting light fall on a piece of specially treated film when a "shutter" was temporarily opened, then closed. The way the film had been made determined how MUCH light was needed to make a picture, but the photographer had two controls to make sure enough light reached the film: how wide the hole in the camera lens was (wider openings allowed more light), and how fast the shutter moved (faster shutters allowed less light). So when I first started taking pictures, I had to adjust the opening, or APERTURE, based on the shutter speed I wanted to use. Why this mattered: if the thing you're photographing is sitting still (a sleeping cat, a flower, etc.), you can use a slow shutter speed and still end up with a good picture. But if the thing you're photographing is moving quickly (a race car, a running child, etc.), you need to use a FASTER shutter speed so that the light doesn't look like a blur. This, however, means you have to open the lens more. Nowadays virtually all cameras, digital and otherwise, have electronics that make this decision for you; others have special settings for action shots, in which they use the fastest shutter speed possible to capture that crack of the bat, a slide into home, or a spin in turn 1. Here's an example of a shot made with a very fast shutter speed, so that the moving object (the little yellow airplane) is frozen: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfisher71/5... FLASH: Virtually all cameras today (apart from cameraphones) have some kind of built-in flash. The idea is that if there isn't a lot of light, the flash adds enough that you'll get a good picture. However, there are two problems with flash pictures: how often you can take them (meaning how fast the flash builds up a charge for its next picture), and "red eye." Some digital cameras have red-eye reduction available in one way or another; if not, many digital cameras come with a CD that has programs you can use to "retouch" your photographs, and removing red eye is the #1 thing people ask for. As for the time it takes for the flash to recharge, that's something to think about if you plan on taking a lot of shots in a dark setting; you may have to wait a few seconds between photos while the flash recharges. Think about whether this would bother you when you're shopping. SHUTTER LAG: Most "point-and-shoot" style digital cameras have a characteristic which ranges from barely noticeable to extremely annoying. Let's say you're taking a picture of your family at Thanksgiving and you say "Cheese!", then you push the button. On a film camera, this would most likely result in an immediate CLICK and you'd take the picture pretty much the instant you push the button. Not so in most digital cameras. You say "Cheese," you push the button, and then some amount of time goes by before the camera goes CLICK. But here's the thing: the camera doesn't take the picture when you push the button, it takes the picture when you hear it CLICK... some time later. So is this a problem? That depends on what's going on in your picture. If you've got everybody lined up in front of the baseball diamond for a team snapshot with the season trophy you just won, shutter lag isn't bad, because nobody's likely to be moving between pushing the button and getting the CLICK, they'll just be grinning. If you're trying to take a picture of little Suzy's game-winning soccer goal, the ball may have bounced out of the net and Suzy may have run completely out of the picture by the time the camera says CLICK. So in short, if you want to take pictures of children, consider what your kids do when you go shopping for the camera. The best camera for taking pictures of children may be very different if your kids play chess, than if your kids ride BMX bikes. Two other terms you might hear: OPTICAL ZOOM versus DIGITAL ZOOM: So we've already covered what zoom means -- adjusting the camera so that it looks as if you were closer or farther way, without actually moving. OPTICAL ZOOM works just like a telescope: you slide the camera's lens back and forth and the image you see gets bigger or smaller. But optical zoom requires a more complex and expensive lens. So DIGITAL ZOOM is a way of cheating: instead of adjusting the lens, the built-in computer simply copies each of the pixels (like stitches in a needlepoint pattern) to make the image bigger. The problem is, if you're taking pictures of diagonal lines, they may look more jagged or "stair-step" because the pixels are bigger. It's like making a mosaic out of 1/4" tiles versus making it out of 3" tiles -- sure, the three-inch mosaic will be a lot bigger, but the curves and diagonals are going to look like sawteeth. This should be enough to get you started on the task of researching cameras. Whether you end up with a digital point-and-shoot camera, an inexpensive film camera, or a more powerful digital camera with more advanced features, thinking about the kind of pictures you want to take will help keep you the most satisfied with your purchase. |
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