Hello Shutter Bugs, I have been fighting with the digital camera vs 35mm slr or the like for some time now. Using QUALITY of output as the only parameter I believe that to get the same results with a digital camera that I can get with a mid priced 35mm and good scanner I will have to spend considerably more money. In the end I still will not have the low light abilities of film with digital(ccd) devices. First if I am wrong then correct me. Second, now that I have decided on conventional photography equipment I need recomendations. I want to take pictures for use as textures and backgrounds. I have no experiance with cameras so I need camera with a good "auto" mode to start. I will add lenses as time goes on and skills improve. Ultimately I want to set up tripod and lighting booth for taking close-ups of materials without shadows for creation of texture libs. Please post or email me with suggestions and any ideas you have. Thanks thunderdon

First if I am wrong then correct me. Yes, completely :P But it all depends on skill - to know what material to use within your budget. Most important question perhaps is, what level of quality are you looking for ? Can you give us an example, or an idea perhaps of what you are looking for as for sharpness, contrast, etc. ?

You are quite right, unless you have a megabudget, it is my understanding that CCD's will not come anywhere near matching the low-light capabilities of film. If you get a SLR camera with auto settings, make sure you also have manual control, because you will want to use these options later to expand your creative range - That is, if photography hooks you, which I know it will! ;-)>

allright... all depends of how much money you wanna spend.... a good camera could be the Nikon F65 (very AUTO, but you can go to manual with some limitations), it is pretty cheap and comes with a Nikon optic bundled. My personal choice would be a Nikon F80. Nice camera, good auto mode but you have mo0re control in the manual environment than the F65. The quality of the shots are better than the F65. This camera body can be bundled with a low-cost nikon optic. a 35-70 I think. now... i have to say that the bundled Nikon optics are really lolw-cost. Plastic, no f control and so on... if you whant something cheap buy the bundle, but IMHO you can save you these money and buy something better. Atr the moment SIGMA doing wonderful optics. My 70-200 f2.8 and my 17-35 are sigma and i'm quite pleased... SIGMA does wonderful low cost optics too... you can buy a nice 70-300 f4.5-5.6 for 250. And are a lot better than low-cost nikon f-less ones. more sturdy and good quality. A good flas for you could be the SB-28 from Nikon. the only one i advice... it's costly... (nearly 750) but it's really integrated with the Nikon Camera body and lead to wonderful results. Besides this the Nikon F80 Camera hhas an integrated TTL flas that do a nice job for himself. So don't bother to buy a flash until you are in touch with the integrated one... it is good enough for beginners. Last advice on Tripod. MANFROTTO ones... definitly. Sturdy (i mean REALLY STURDY), nice, very eclectic and modular. Pretty cheap too. The heads are modulars so you could change the head components on the fly... to see some models go to www.manfrotto.it. Don't worry... they ship worldwide. I've bought from Manfrotto all ,my Tripods and head and the statives too... i'm really pleased of the products. For the head my personal advice is the Joystick one... comes really in handy and cost less than 100 .....

Yeah, manfrotto is the only option for tripods. There are no substitutes. May be a bit expensive, but it'll last longer than the love for my girlfriend =) My tripod head is one with 3 seperate handles (left-right, back-forth and turn-around) and it has a angle 'scale' in steps of 10 degrees. One thing I don't like about my tripod is the 'loose' legs, cause they snap back so quickly and hard that I've hurt my finger a couple of times. :) Sigma's indeed great, but if you're looking for good quality, good for EX lenses only. But nothing's wrong with sigma, like Artax pointed out. Good point about using Nikon btw ;) One last thing that might be usefull to know is to buy PRIME lenses only, if your budget allows it. Nikkor primes are very well coated fixed length lenses, so no zoom lenses. Zooms may seem usefull, but they're not. There's a tale that with for instance a 50-200mm zoom lens you wouldn't need your 50, 80, 135, 180, 200mm lenses anymore & just use one lens. This is not true, while you'll hear it in a lot of photo stores. To me personally, my list of things that are most important should look something like this: 1. prime lens 2. choice of film 3. body's brand 4. body's type. Just like Artax wrote, go for Nikon or Sigma first, then decide on which body to use, etc.

I'm indeed a fanatic of photographic equipment and i own a lot of lenses and some camera body. When my father teached me how to shot i was only 5 and the optics available were almost only fixed lenght. I still own 2 dozens of fixed-lenght optics original by nikon. At that times zoom lenses were a lot more expensive compared to fixed-lenght ones with the same characteristics (when such zooms were available... coz in the beginning of the '80 were a bit difficult to find an 80-210 f2.8 anyway) and in many ways more low-quality. These days zooms are a completely different matter. Let's look to SIGMA ones, since i've extensively tested 'em... i'm a bit more sure of what i'm saying... ;P with the new APO EX serie SIGMA has resolved a number of problems regarding the Cromatic aberrations and the extension of the optic... The High-end ones has good f too. (my 70-200 for example is a fix f.2.8). Another good reason to prefer zooms is the price. My 70-200 2.8 costs nearly 1.500. How much it costs a 70mm f.2.8 + 135mm f.2.8 + 200mm f.2.8 needed to cover the same optical excursion of the 70-200? In addition SIGMA made an interesting tele-converter to lenghten your APO EX optics by 1.4x or 2.0x Of course, thare are some interesting things about having some fixed - lenght optics. but many times you simply can't overburden your bag with tons of fixed-lenght optics. Anyway the better choices are always in the middle.... My advice is to get some zoom stuff to cover your pimary needs like a 35-70 and an 80-210 and a couple of fixed -lenght like a good 50mm and a 28mm (damn i like wide lenses). Last word on 35-70 stuff... my advice is the Nikon one. really nice 35-70 f.2.8 with a nice manual macro. It's pretty cheap and very very very eclectic. Hope to be helpful... =D Artax

whatever you get, make sure it has the capability do go "fully manual." There are some cameras that are "priority" mode cameras (eg: aperture priority). If the camera has the ability to do the priority settings on top of being given the option to have full control, then that's cool, though it'll prolly cost a prettier penny. Personally dude, me thinks if you start out with a camera with a good auto mode, that you'll get stuck in a bit of a rut. I'd say go for a straight up manual camera. That way, you have no choice but to learn how to use it, and you'd be surprised how quickly you'll catch on. Also, if yer gonna do texture stuff, might be a good idea to invest in a macro lens. As for camera recommendations, well, generally, the higher the price, the higher the quality (in most cases). Me thinks that (in canadian dollars), you could get a pretty decent camera, used, for about 200-400 dollars (one that would be between 400-700 new). All you gotta do is look around. Don't buy online either for this kind of stuff. You'll wanna take a roll with you to the store, and shoot a few shots around the store (if they'll allow), just to make sure that the lens, even though it looks spotless, isn't completely fucked.

Well, I'd be the last one to doubt your knowledge on this matter. I know hardly anything about lenses other than Nikkor's (35 mm wise I mean). Still, the Nikkor primes are still much better, as for their optical quality, than the zooms. I'm sure you know that the 180/2.8, 300/2.8 and the 600/2.8 (all ED IF or AFS, doesn't matter that much) are still top of the bill for me, personally. The 80-200 2.8 isn't even worthy of standing in the shadow of the 180 - not even the newest model, while (especially used) it's twice as expensive. Together with an original 16mm 2.8 Nikkor and a 50 1.2, you'll have more than you'll ever need to buy untill the day you die (and you probably will soon, looking at the weight of all this ;) Hehe :) Well, again, I've only used Nikkor (ever - since day #1), so I can't judge any other brand of lenses.....

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!! BTW... if you gonna buy something used a MF could be a choice... good used Rollieflex 2.8 around at less than 600 Euros... =) I bought mine for 450Euros and it's flawless

Hey btw, that reminds me.....something like a mamiya 330(c) or another old fashioned medium cam would be pretty awesome stuff to start out with. I mean, it would -make- you learn to shoot on manual ;) Wow, 450, that's awesome! When did they make those lenses ? I mean, are they old, or still with Ai and stuff ? (sounds interesting!)

I'm not an expert in photography, but my first "good" 35mm
camera was (and is) a Pentax K1000. It's a strictly manual
camera. Some refer to it as a "student" camera. I learned
how to use it on my own, after reading up on the subject,
and it was fairly easy to do. It has a built in (averaging)
light meter, and that allows you to concentrate a bit more
on composition etc.

My philosophy when deciding to buy it was that I wanted to
have as much creative control and flexibility as possible.
I knew that at that point I didn't have any experience in
photography, but that's never scared me off of anything
before :-) With some time and good books on the subject I
knew that I'd either learn or would sell the camera off.

Looking back, the only regret I have about the K1000 is the
lack of high quality lenses to fit it. I generally prefer
primes (i.e. fixed focal length, non-zooms) because I think
they are better optimized for their given focal length.

If I had it to do over again I would've gotten a Nikon, if
for no other reason than there is a much better selection
of quality (e.g. Nikkor) prime lenses on the market for it.
It's a very well supported brand of camera.

I currently also have a Canon Powershot G2 digital camera,
which has lots of automatic features. The only automatic
mode I use is Aperture Priority mode. This allows me to
control the f-stops manually, and therefore control the
depth of field. And that's just for quick shots when I
don't want to be slowed down by having to set the shutter
speed. Otherwise I shoot in Manual mode. With that in mind,
I figure that I spent extra money on a lot of fancy features
that I never use. That's a shame.

The moral of this story is, if you buy a strictly automatic
camera, you'll outgrow it in no time. If you buy a good
manual camera, you'll grow into it in no time.

I'd recommend Nikon. Buy a good used one from a reputable
camera shop and you'll save even more money.

Ok I posted this message a while ago with picture and everything and it never got here? To get a feel for the things I want to do with camera go to http://www.marlinstudios.com and take a look at the texture libs and images created with them. As photographers you might want to pay attention to the pricing for these products and what comes on cd's. These libs are the best available to 3d artists (in my opinion). To a 3d artist they are important, as anything that doesn't have to be explicitly modeled saves time in both creation and especially the rendering end of image creation. It would take a supercomputer to render some of the sample images if everything were done with polygon meshes. The attatched image Deep Forest 2 is a sample of my work and what I want to use a camera for. The background and main element are photos with foreground and ground plane detail being 3d models. I will be adding buttetflies and other small 3d modeled details soon. Entire time to create image AND render was under 2 hours. The link below: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=thunderdon will lead you to some of my other work. Textures of rust, bricks, bark, distant trees and other details are scattered throughout. I appreciate all the advise and have made notes on products mentioned. Any more thoughts you have after reviewing this message would be appreciated. Just a thought... After you check out the testure lib link above I may be able to interest some of you in joining forces, your photo skills + my digital skills = texture lib $$$. We may not get rich but it could help you pay for that new lens or ?. The product could be sold right here in the store. After all you're taking photos and I'm working on digital images anyway?