How To Choose The Right Digital Camera For You

Many times I've been asked what the best digital camera to get is. The response is, as you've probably heard quite a few times, "it depends on what you want to do." And what you want to do creates a need. That’s all very well but how do you know exactly what you need?

Once you work out what types of digital photos you want to improve then choosing a camera will seem difficult and confusing. In the end you will have a hard time and probably end up not choosing a digital camera at all and this is not good because your digital photos will remain the same. You can certainly have a great experience in digital photography, but if you have the right camera you'll find that this experience is vastly improved.

For starters, think about the digital photographs you have taken in the past and think about your frustration with them. Are they to dark? Is the lag time too long? Is it out of focus when you try to get long distance digital photos? Or alternatively are have you tried to get digital photos that seem out of focus up close, or you can't get close enough in to your subjects?

For example I have a subscriber who just loves to take digital photographs of flowers. She's a lady in her 60's and is an avid Gardner and asked me to help her to capture the brilliant colour and detail of her carefully grown flowers. I suggested that with the camera she had been using to date, her flowers would have two problems:

Colour saturation (which creates lack of detail) and the camera would not provide her with the ability to get focused shots up close, even when the "flower" setting was on, on her digital camera. She confirmed this was indeed the problem she was having. As a help, I gave her some pointers to what may help her digital photography experience by looking at the problems in the current digital camera, then finding an active solution.

The problem was that a lot of point and shoot digital cameras may be fantastic and feel like a bargain at $200 they just don't have the digital sensor capabilities to capture to fine detail when there is a bulk amount of colour in the scene. Let’s take for example a digital photograph of a yellow rose. The digital camera would not be able to distinguish the detail in the petals up close because it gets lost in "all the yellow". Because the digital camera's sensor built for the bottom end range it’s not able to capture this fine detail.

My subscriber was also having trouble with her detail in focus up close. Even though she was selecting the "flower" setting, it still was not as clear up close as it could be. And due to the colour saturation in her digital photos she was having difficulty getting the clear digital images that she imagined getting in her mind. I suggested that she may want to look at a digital camera with a capability to add macro lenses. I explained that the sensor would be able to pick up more detail in the colour of the flowers if she had better lenes for the macro photography that she wanted to do. A good macro lens would give her the detail up close, and she could get in even closer than before without loosing focus or detail.

In the end my lady subscriber ended up choosing a Sony digital camera with interchangeable lenses and with a better sensor. She was extremely impressed with the new digital image quality her photographs were getting. She was able to photograph the petals up very close and even capture the tiny veins in the petals of the flowers.

I recommend you do the same. Think about the frustrations you've had in the past as then find a camera to suit. Try to look first at the digital cameras that have the features and facilities you are after, and then look at the whole range. Not the other way around. Looking at every single digital camera first may confuse you; its better to narrow your search down to the features first.

Happy shooting!

By Amy Renfrey - Digital photograpy success