Cameras For Beginning Photographers

If you are looking at cameras for beginning photographers really you need to know whether to buy a cheap point-and-shoot camera, bycause it is unlikely that the recipient will take the hobby seriously or whether you should buy something that will whet his or her appetite and ecourage them to take it further. After all, basic cameras are built into many mobile phones these days. However, if you would rather one of the real cameras for beginning photographers, there are some things to consider.

Cameras For Beginning Photographers

Let's assume that you want a real camera with real controls. The choice of cameras for beginning photographers in this range is mind-boggling, but you can limit the scope by first setting a price range.

The most important thing in digital photography is light. If you can capture lots of light, then you have more options with regards to special effects. Light is admitted into the camera through the lens and the diameter of the lens, the aperture, is the key dimension here. The larger the aperture the more light can get in.

If the light can get in quickly, then you can have a faster shutter speed or a wider range of shutter speeds. A fast shutter speed will allow you to take unblurred photos of high speed objects like a racing horse running, which would be blurred by a slower shutter speed. The aperture and shutter speeds are crucial for photographs with precision focus and a great depth of field.

If you want to be able to take high quality photos which you can blow up and manipulate with a computer program, then you will want photos of high resolution. Resolution is measured in megapixels in the world of digital cameras. Therefore, the more megapixels the better. Seven to ten megapixels is bottom end these days and 36+ is top end.

The higher the resolution the more memory a photograph will need, so make sure that the camera has plenty of RAM and a slot for an external memory card, usually called a flash card.

Even cameras for beginning photographers will have dozens of functions and many settings and most people never use them. However, a budding photographer might like to experiment with them. Most of these functions and features are exposure controls for manipulating light.

However, most of these extra features are built into the image editing software that normally comes on CD with the digital camera. This largely makes many of the features built into the digital camera redundant for the amateur.

The normal entry-level digital cameras for beginning photographers have a fixed lens, however, you may want to use interchangeable lenses in order to get even more special effects. In order to be able to do this, you will have to buy a Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera or Digital SLR (DSLR), but these are a lot more expensive.

Cameras for beginning photographers will often have two types of zoom: optical zoom and digital zoom. Digital zoom just increases the size of the dots (pixels) that make up the digital photo, so it is of limited use where the resolution is low. However, optical zoom is real magnification.

Optical magnification is like looking down a telescope, so the picture is just as sharp on zoom as on close up. When investigating cameras for beginning photographers ignore the amount of digital zoom and concentrate on optical zoom.