i dont know anything about asm, macro, etc. and how it affects the picture please explain it to me! :] Or a good site A digital SLR basically has the following advantages:
* It's vastly more responsive than a digital compact camera. With compact cameras, the autofocus takes forever, you have annoying shutter lag, you even have lag due to the electronic viewfinder. With a dSLR everything is much faster. With action shots (even with kids and pets) that means you get more keepers.
* Bigger viewfinder. I know it sounds trivial, but the viewfinder is the most important user interface. I like to see details when I look through a viewfinder - not just check the composition.
* Better low light performance. dSLR cameras keep working without the flash during dusk and indoors. You can crank the ISO up to 1600 and still get great image quality. If you add a dedecated low light lens, like a 50mm f/1.4, you can even do street photography at night. (I do with my Nikon.)
* More control over depth of field. To put it simply, with dSLR cameras, you can take a picture of something or someone and deliberately blow the background out of focus. This makes the subject stand out better and it's a major aspect of photography - that you don't get with compact cameras.
* Extra features. Depending on how much you're willing to spend, you can get a dSLR with buttons and switches for just about anything: different kinds of auto focus, central and spot metering, mirror lockup, white balance, exposure compensation, bracketing, and so forth. You don't have to use any of those - but you can if you want to. They let you tweak the camera settings on the fly for any kind of shot (much better than the scene-modes in a compact camera, like fireworks, mountains, ...).
* Practically unlimited choice of lenses. With a compact camera, you have 5x or 10x zoom, and that's it. I used to have a camera with 10x zoom myself, but indoors I was constantly backing up into walls. With my dSLR, I can slap on a super wide angel lens and make my tiolet look like a ball room. Or I can use a macro lens and do close up shots of a bee.
The down sides to all that goodness are that a dSLR costs more (if you want extra lenses, each lens can be more expensive than a compact camera) and if you collect a lot of gear over time, you'll end up dragging it all around in a heavy camera bag. That's a HUGE question as obtaining the maximum potential out of a DSLR requires skill and experience not just basic knowledge of vocabulary. I would strongly suggest taking a photography class either in school (if you're in college for instance) or at a community center. You could also get a good book about DSLR digital photography and just experiment and practice. |
