DSLR Camera Advice Pleeeease

[joeted]

Hello all
Im just starting out with photography and cant wait to get started but theres just one little thing stopping me from getting started, I need a camera.
Ive heard lots about Nikon and Canon and that its good to get a camera that can have alot of lenses added to it as you get better.
I was just wondering if you guys can give me your views on the best DSLR for beginners please.
I want to photograph wildlife especially birds of prey and I want to take lots of landscape photos so I need one thats best for these.My budget is about £400.
Thanks very much in advance
Kind regards
Joe.

[jackvdbuk]

sadly 400 doesnt quite cut the mustard, you'll will just about manage a body and stock lens with the cash, i bought a canon 450d for about 400 which is an excellent enthusiast camera but lenses have shot up in price which is a real shame so costs loads more than i had planned.

i suggest going to a local jessops and have a look and feel on the cameras especially the 450D

do ALOT of research, get a good book such as http://www.amazon.co.uk/Photographer...6555137&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Understandin...pd_sim_b_1_img

both excellent books &
http://www.camerapricebuster.co.uk is your best friend on finding the best price on the lens/body you want!

im only guessing here but a wide angle lens is best for landscapes and a good long telephoto for birds of prey!

i still know very little which everyone else will probably tell you in the upcoming posts!

[blueball]

Whether you get a Canon or a Nikon doesn't matter; what matters is that the camera works for you; that you enjoy using it and that you feel the need to keep using it and not shove it in a drawer.

Do use Jessops (or a good local camera shop if you have one) - try the cameras in the shop; do they feel comfortable; cameras come in all different sizes and depending on your hand size and general physique, what suits one person won't suit you. Remember that you will carry this thing around with you, and the lenses; are you prepared to carry that weight around all day?

In short, if you want to be serious about it (and landscapes to wild birds is a huge range), then DO NOT BUY THE FIRST CAMERA YOU SEE!. Take your time, find what you like, be prepared to save up a bit more to get what you want and don't try and buy every lens available.

Hope this helps?

[YorkieBen]

I dont want to get into a camera brand war but I would say if you are looking at a budget set up for long range wildlife I would look at a system with built in image stabilisation - Nikon and Canon lenses are stabilised but not all lenses - Sony, Pentax and the 4/3s systems offer stabilisation in body, thus making all lenses stabilised.

For budget wildlife you want a 70-300mm lens really. You can get a Sony A200 w/ 18-70mm & 75-300mm lenses for £380 from warehouse express http://www.warehouseexpress.com/prod...px?sku=1024309

Although Canon and Nikon have a bigger range of lenses than the other brands, at your budget level (and mine) there aren't really any major gaps in their line up - all have macro, telephotos, fast and slow lenses.

[BUFF]

As long as it's comfortable for you (so go to a shop) to use the Sony A200 is probably the best for you given your budget & aims.
You could get a Nikon D40 for similar money but the Sony's 10Mp will let you crop further over the Nikon's 6Mp with similar focal length teles & with only 300mm you'll probably find that useful for your birds.

Amazon are doing the A200+18-70mm kit lens for £245 shipped & then warehouse Express will do you a Tamron 70-300mm LD Di for £112 in Sony fit. Grand total £357 allowing you some change to get a CF card, cleaning kit etc.

[Whiternoise]

At that budget, bear in mind you could get a top end prosumer camera, one of those hefty 10-25x "super zoom"s. The image quality is getting better and better on them and whilst you wouldn't get the same sort of quality you would with some nice glass and an SLR, they're worth considering. You'd be able to buy a very nice camera with a hundred quid to put in your pocket too!

Especially if you're new to photography i'd recommend the above, most of them will have more or less full manual controls, you don't have to worry about lenses or dirty sensors, and you can work your way from auto mode to learning about more advanced techniques. The money you save could go towards editing software, photography books, etc.

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Ca...rShot_SX10_IS/
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/q109superzoomgroup/

As people have said, the A200 is your best shot. If you're going to be shooting long distances, the in-body stabilisation is an absolute boon. Whilst you can certainly get a Nikkor or Canon lens with image stabilisation over the same range - the 70-300mm VR for instance - it'll cost you more or less your budget on the lens alone!

Just wander down to town, handle all you can, and ask to try out a few telephoto lenses too.

On the other end of the scale, consider waiting a bit and saving up so you can get a nice lens so you're not so constrained with budget.

The D40 is good, but i'd advise against since you'd have to buy either the 55-200mm AF-S or the 70-300mm AF-S (to get round the niggling auto-focus problems), both of which would set you back quite a lot (and realllly you want the 70-300). If you desperately want to go with Nikon or Canon, and at this point they're not really your best option, you could consider getting a second hand D80 and a Sigma 70-300mm. It's a great camera, but bear in mind you'd be buying old tech (i was tempted, but i'm saving for a D90 now!).

[joeted]

Thank you all very much I really appreciate your help. Im taking all your advice in and checking out the cameras youve mentioned.Now this may sound dumb but can you explain the lenses to me a bit e.g what does a 18 - 70mm lens actually mean and what is it best used for etc ?

[Bobster]

18-70mm is a wide to medium lens its a good starting point for landscapes and portraits, a generally good walk about lens..

just googled and found this
http://www.photoanswers.co.uk/Advice...ed/?&R=EPI-803

[YorkieBen]

http://www.tamroneurope.com/flc.htm


This is a useful tool for understanding focal lengths (make sure you select digital rather than 35mm).

The Tamron 70-300mm lens suggested above is a nice and cheap telephoto and punches above its price range I think

[Whiternoise]

Physics wise the focal length is a property of any single lens or (as with cameras) a group of lenses. It corresponds to the distance from the front element of a lens group (so basically the first piece of glass the light hits) to the sensor at the back of the camera. However, pretty much all lens manufacturers cheat a bit by adding more than one lens so that they can make smaller housing. For instance, a 200mm lens need not be 20cm long.

1/image + 1/object = 1/focal length

The image is the projection, the object is what you're photographing and the focal length is an output of that. These are distances of course! Normally 1/image is a negative number as in optics we usually define everything to the left of the lens (assuming the object is to the right) as negative - just like a number line.

It's important to note that this is when your subject has been focussed at "infinity". If you're taking a photo of a landscape and you want to get a shot of a tree nearby - say with a lens that's "fixed" at 50mm, you need to move the lens slightly to get it into focus. So, realistically, the focal length gives you the distance, when at infinity focus, that everything will be sharp.

Similarly, the F/Ratio of a lens is (besides being confusingly named) is the ratio of the diameter of a lens to it's focal length. The reason that "fast" lenses cost so much is that they need to be so big. For instance, a 500mm lens like the Bigma would need a diameter of 250mm just to get down to f/2. As it happens, it's got a maximum aperture of f/6.3 at 500mm, which corresponds to a diameter of 80mm. This makes sense, the filter size (or the diameter of the lens, basically) is 86mm.

Finally magnification factors. This is where the concept of "zoom" comes in. Mag = Fmax/Fmin. So an 18-70mm lens has a zoom of 70/18 ~ 3.2x. Magnification is thus on a logarithmic scale, it gets harder and harder to zoom in on subjects far away - it's obvious when you're zooming through 18-70mm (3x), but from 70-135mm it's a less apparent (2x). This is why you don't see anything above around 600mm in mainstream lenses, after about 400 it gets uneconomical to provide more "zoom". You can buy 800mm, 1300mm lenses, but they're VERY expensive (it's also half a meter long, around 20cm wide and weighs 5kg - i'd just walk closer to be honest).

All you need to worry about is:

0-20mm is wide
20-70 is medium range
70 and above is getting into telephoto territory, going on to 400+ which is "super-tele".

[j.o.s.h.1408]

what about the canon 400d? cheaper then a 450d yet does an equal job?

[kalniel]

what about the canon 400d? cheaper then a 450d yet does an equal job?

Not an equal job, or it'd be called a 450d rather than 400

[joeted]

Thanks so much all
Im reading all the posts over and over to try and understand all the lens's and basically all the lingo its pretty tough.
I was looking at ebay earlier at the sigma 70-300mm lens and the descriptions for these say "Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 APO DG MACRO LENS" . A helpful poster posted a excellent link for me that describes the different types of lens and in the link the macro lens is the lens you want for shooting tiny insects,flowers etc. I thought the 70-300mm lens was a telephoto one ?? so how come in the descriptions it says "macro" ? Am I being a real dumb dumb ?
Heres the link by the way Enjoy! Digital SLR camera

[joeted]

abcd

[joeted]

efgh - sorry bout these last 2 wierd posts but I cant leave a link in my posts until i have a minimum of 5 posts . so i'll leave the link about the different type lenses in my next (6th) post

[joeted]

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/enjoydslr/part3/3A.html
Link to the macro,telephoto etc lens descriptions