clydeman wrote:
Gfen
Cannot tell which is shot with the more expensive camera.
Soft Hackle pic? Just a guess.
You are correct, the only way I could tell is by the picture name, I've had one longer than the other so it's taken more pictures.
That sums up my point, though. You don't need high end or expensive gear, you just need something that fills the requirements put forth, which is a close focus. Period. "Macro mode," if you will. The cute little flower icon on the program mode menu.
Traditionally, there were two advantages of a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera, through the lens (TTL) composition and the ability to change lenses.
TTL isn't nearly as important, because 99% of the pictures people take are composed on the LCD. That's actually a step backwards in time, to when photographs were composed on a ground glass that the film was slipped in front of. The loss of TTL and a view finder isn't really too much of an issue, to be honest.
THen there's the ability to change lenses, the single most important feature of a SLR. Its also the one the most people skip over anymore. In Ye Olde Days up 'til the '80s, people primarily carried "prime lenses." Single focal lengths. 35mm. 50mm. 85mm. Etc. They did this because zooms were too many compromises along the spectrum, and if you needed to go from wide (35mm) to a short tele (85mm), you didn't turn the zoom ring, you swapped the lens.
Optical design has come a long way, and superzooms that went from 28mm to 220mm became deriguer. Suddenly, people who just wanted a "good camera" and bought an SLR could buy one superzoom and cover 99% of what they do, and thought that because it had lots of dials and widgets they were better snapshotters than the guy who just used the cheap PnS camera.
All they've done is spent two or three times as much, carried 5-10x as much weight and bulk, and enhanced their ability to make images by a fraction more than what they could do with their PnS cameras.
Let's just take a break, and a thinking exercise. Of all your friends who are "really good photographers," how many of them regularly switch out the lenses versus doing 99% of their work with one zoom that covers from wide to tele (ie, 18mm to 105mm in our modern APS-C sensorized world)?
There are going to be situations where mo'better gear is an advantage to the simple PnS camera. Why not learn where those are by butting up against them and employ a decent PnS first, then you'll recognize the places where the high end gear will come into play. You're also better served with a small, budget camera you carry with you at all times versus an expensive DSLR that weighs too much and isn't water proof and etc etc etc that stays back at your car.
To sum it all up, you catch a big trout. 18-20" and you tell your friends abotu it, what do they ask? "Hey man, great fish, what brand of rod did you use?"
Now, with all that said, I bought a Pentax WS80 for $99 on sale. Its fantastic outdoors, but a little lackluster indoors with the software based image stablization on. That's the latest in a long list of Pentax equipment, which has always focused (no pun intended) on quality gear at budget prices. You won't impress the Internet nerds with model numbers, but you'll get it done with the finest lenses outside of W. Germany.
