Natwerk Designs

Cameras? Low light? HD? MP? MB.zoom?

I'm 14. Im VERY good at graphic design and photoshop CS2 although I don't often get called for a job, I am a tech geek with computers but do't know much about cameras. Right now I use my moms 4MP .... maybe 5 zoom camera. It sucks I want to take better pictures I can edit to advertise my graphic work. I have a horse, a paint and he is usually against some nice backgrounds. I want some high quality work to capture both him and the country landscapes. I also want a low light camera (although not as much as it will rarley be used) or a camera good for concerts.What is the highest camera zoom? How will MP and zoom work together to get a good picture? I go to Jonas Brother concerts where I am 50th row, or 3rd row balcony still high up. The light is dim and my camera is low quality and clearly the zoom isnt great.

Public Comments

1. As far as point-and-shoots go, the highest optical zoom you can get seems to be around 18x. Concerning megapixels: anything over 5mp should be reasonable for the general person's need. As far as low-light performance goes, you're not going to get it in a point-and-shoot camera. P&Ss have tiny sensors and tiny lenses and are thus pretty terrible at gathering light. The problem is compounded even more when you zoom in because the camera can gather even less light when zoomed in. Therefore, the sad reality is that there's really no point-and-shoot camera that can take good concert pics 50 rows from the stage. To be honest, you can't even take good concert pics right in front of the stage. If you really want good low-light performance you'll need an SLR with a good lens - and even then it'll take some good technique. As far as taking pictures outside of horses and landscapes goes, any point-and-shoot should be able to do an acceptable job of that - even your mom's. More megapixels and more zoom aren't going to make those pictures any better. Learning how to properly compose a shot probably will.
2. The only point and shoot I would go with for that kind of work is a canon G9. The reason being you can shoot RAW and thats what you really want to be editing. But really you should be getting and learning how to use a DSLR. You will want a wide angle lens and a wide maximum aperture lens for low light concert shots. Go with a Canon XSi, 30D, 50D. The 30D and 50D have a lot better high ISO performance than the XSi and you will want that for low light. For concerts a good lens is the 85mm f/1.8 as it has a very wide maximum aperture and some reach. Other more expensive options are the 135 f/2 and 70-200 f/2.8. For a wide angle, the 16-35 f/2.8 is the best, but there are a number of cheaper options such as the Sigma 10-20, Tokina 12-24, Canon 10-22, and the Tokina 11-16. The 11-16 has the advantage of being f/2.8 throughout the range, where as the other wide angles are f/4 or higher. So, while 11-16 is a very small range you have the benefit of f/2.8 which would be a lot better for low light. I own the tokina 11-16, and I can say that sometimes I wish it did zoom in farther, but other times I just love the f/2.8. For Nikon you can go with the D60, D70, D80 or D90. The D40 is really cheap, but is only 6 mega pixels so that may not work for you in terms of a lot of post processing and manipulation. All the lenses that I mentioned for Canon are made for Nikon as well or Nikon makes the equivalent in terms of the 85mm lens although I think the aperture is f/1.4.