Photography Sacramento CA

Other than the thousand-dollar camera and nice tripod, what distinguishes the professional photographer from the average person? The answer is, quite simply, a matter of perspective. Let’s take the case of John Common, the standard non-photographic picture taker. John uses his camera as a sort of historical recording device; he takes pictures of his family in front of the Grand Canyon, he takes pictures of his family in front of their new house, and he takes pictures of his niece as she takes her first few steps. For John, photos are merely a way of bringing back memories, and few other people beside John and his immediate family would ever be interested in looking at his photos.

Let’s take a second case, that of Jane Amateur. Jane, like John, uses a small point-and-shoot camera, the sort of thing one might by at a local electronics shop for not much more than a hundred dollars. Unlike John, though, she uses her camera as a picture frame. The pictures, the colors, the shapes and forms, all already exist in nature. What she realizes is that the art of photography is finding that picture and framing it permanently. Her pictures, taken with the same camera, may be of things as seemingly random as trees or leaves or old brick buildings – and yet the average person will look at them, linger over them, and feel compelled more because of the simple beauty Jane has managed to capture in her work.

Whether you’re more of a John or more of a Jane, you’ll probably start with a simple point and shoot camera. If you’re more artistic, you can use that simple camera to decide if you like photography enough to make the significant investment it will take to buy a modern SLR camera. A good point and shoot will also teach you the basics of photography.

The first question you might ask is whether you’ll want to go with a film camera or a digital camera. These days, it’s hardly a fair contest, especially with consumer priced cameras. Film is expensive; after the initial thirty or forty dollars you’ll spend on a memory chip, you’ll be able to take an infinite number of pictures. This is the primary quality of digital cameras, and is an invaluable one when you’re just getting started and are taking hundreds of pictures on every outing. There are still a few film die hards, but they’re getting fewer – and the difference in consumer cameras is minute enough as to put digital cameras in this category far ahead of its film competitions. Even ordering prints is easy, as you can bring in your camera or a CD with pictures into the usual developing center and have them make prints of only those pictures you want, rather than the usual film method of developing everything.

There are plenty of choices out there – one only has to walk into an electronics store and browse the digital camera section to see that. You’ll rarely be able to pay less than a hundred dollars for a digital camera, and if you’re serious about photography, you really won’t want to.

A few key phrases you’ll notice when talking with sales personnel are mega pixels and zoom. Mega pixels determines the resolution or quality of the pictures the camera can take. The more mega pixels the camera is capable of, the larger the prints you’ll be able to make with clarity. Generally, it’s good to look for a camera of at least five mega pixels.

The second catchphrase you’ll find thrown around is zoom. There are two kinds of zoom, and this can be confusing to many. Digital zoom is accomplished by manipulating the sensor chip inside the camera. This is essentially cheating; it leads to a grainier, blurrier image in return for increasing the picture size. If you want good, high quality zoom, you’ll have to get optical zoom, the sort of zoom achieved by a set of binoculars, for instance.

You’ll also want to watch out for features in the camera. Things like white balance, aperture control, and shutter speed all determine the control you can have over the photographic process. Most digital point and shoot cameras these days, especially those from big name models like Canon or Kodak, include a wide variety of these features. If you’re only going to be recording memory shots (like John Common in the example above), you really don’t have to worry about the peripherals – but if you’re really interested in artistic photography, do some research and be ready to differentiate when you get to the store in Sacramento.