...and make it snappy!

I think about photography too much. My Olympus Camedia C-310 has been a great friend and has taken a lot of good photos and a handful of very good ones. I'd decided to get an SLR, something like the Canon 350D perhaps. I want to be able to manually set speed and aperture settings, get appropriate depth of field, motion blur or freeze frame and all that jazz. And then my attention was drawn to cameras like the Olympus MJU 800, which has 8 megapixels - that's as many as SLRs like the Canon. And it's about half the price. What you'd be paying for with an SLR is adjustability and a far better lens.

Apart from the price there's the issue of What Kind of Photos do I want to take? See, what I'm thinking, apart from people snapping away at parties and on their holidays, nobody is going to be recording our lives, now, in this town. A local artist, Vince Rea, took a load of pictures of the people of Jarrow in the mid 70s, and you can get a book of the collection from the library. All of them are good pictures, none are brilliant. But the record is there. People who are old in those pictures are in the ground now. The young are middle aged. Time moves on but images freeze a frame in time.

That's what I want to do - record the world we live in now. So maybe a compact digitial camera like the MJU would be better. I mean, if you've got an SLR you've got a camera, no mistake, and people act differently around a camera, whereas they might barely notice a compact - most people have mobile phones these days, which look similar at first glance...

Any comments on this question, SLR or compact, would be appreciated.

Comments

  1. JohnSat Dec 03, 08:23:00 pm GMT

    I do miss the SLR ant the really nice and artsy pics I could take, but my compact is just too easy to slip into a pocket.

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  2. FactoBruntSun Dec 04, 05:38:00 pm GMT

    Ooh, interesting stuff!

    One aspect of it is "how much do you want to spend?".

    But, I think the most important question that you raise is "what do you want to take?". Recording the world we live in now is a great idea, and I think it could be easily achieved using both cameras you mention (don't forget the Nikon D50 DSLR either).

    From my experience I would always go with the SLR. There's lots of reasons, and none are based on the number of pixels - which is not an issue any longer. 8 megapixels is almost no increase on 6, and even 12 isn't much better than 6 - and that's because it's all a measure of area (so 36 megapixels is twice the resolution of 6 megapixels, and that's a long way off being in our everyday cameras). Image quality is based mostly on the lens quality, and SLRs have much better lenses - and even if one you buy doesn't you can always save up and buy a lens that is good quality to fit your SLR.

    Snappy pictures can be taken by snappy cameras or SLRs, but great portraits, great landscapes, etc. can only be taken on SLRs with decent lenses (in my opinion). There's no way half of my photography could be done on my wife's snappy camera (even though it was an expensive one).

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