With the advent of digital cameras some consumers are getting a little more serious about photography. Although these days you can get some pretty good images with your consumer camera, we decided to take a closer look at the professional camera and the consumer camera and see what the differences are. There are a few things that differentiate a consumer and a professional photographer, like professional lighting, professional posing and composition. These are only a few important things that most consumers don't know much about and where a professional photographer is schooled in such things. I will discuss these in a later blog.
But today, I wanted to point out some quality differences between a consumer digital camera and a professional digital camera. You will see I took a photo of our designer Cassie Swartwout in my camera room. The first photo I took with my professional Fuji S5 camera with my basic studio lighting. In the second photo I took a picture of Cassie with her Canon A540 consumer camera. Hers is a 6 megapixel camera with a few professional settings, such as its ability to set it to manual and control aperture and shutter speed. However, in the second photo we set it to program mode and let it shoot with its built-in flash (which is the way most people use their cameras).
The first big difference you see is the flash was not quite powerful enough to expose Cassie properly. We actually did some Photoshop work on it to improve the exposure and make it brighter. The top inset is how it came directly out of the camera. The bottom inset is a close up of the actual pixels which shows a lot of noise (that's all the multi-colored specs in the close-up). Compare that with the inset on the first photo taken with my professional camera. There is no noise in the close-up and it is clearer. Furthermore, professional cameras are much more acurate with color. The clarity and acurate color of the professional photo is a function of its higher quality sensor as well as its higher quality lens.
Consumer cameras, for the price, are usually good enough for small snapshot sized prints. But if you are looking to enlarge your photos from a consumer camera you will run into problems with noise and lack of clarity.
The third picture was also taken with Cassie's camera and this time we used the studio lights to light her and the room. Again we took the photo on the program setting but no flash. This time we don't see as much noise (because there was more available light) but we still can't compare with clarity and color in the professional photo.
There are many reasons to use a professional photographer-professional technology is one reason. Next time I will discuss how posing, composition and professional lighting are even more reasons to leave it to the professional.
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1 comment:
This is a great post. It is informative and it is educational. In my opinion, too many people think that all they need to be a 'good' photographer is to have a 'good' camera. Your post makes it very clear that it requires specific knowledge and skills. Having the proper lighting equipment might help. But, the knowledge and skills allow experience/pro photographers to get good shots using natural, limited lighting. Very good post.
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