The question of "How Much Camera Do You Need" has come up a number of times on the board over the years. Disposable vs Digital Point-and-Shoots vs SLR and DSLR cameras. Disposables are primarily a fixed focus lens. For the most part these cameras are used for a variety of styles of photography so most are wide angle equivalent lenses, probably in the 28-35mm range if not less. The smaller that number is before the mm the wider angle is captured in the photograph taken. So as an example if you took a picture of a person from five feet away with a disposable you'd probably capture from the waist up. Standing at the same distance with another camera with a 200mm lens you'd probably get the eyeball only. So in the event you're attempting to capture a good photograph of a Bigfoot, the wider angle your lens is the closer you'll have to be to get a recognizable picture. These first two pictures are 100% crops, that means I took the full picture captured in my camera and did no resizing, this is the actual size of the image captured, so when it comes to editing for color, focus, sharpening etc. this is what you have to work with. The next set of pictures are the full pictures resized to 800x600 to show just how much of the entire frame is filled with the subject being photographed.

Target in the photos was a tree stump above the water line, best guess about 8 feet tall. Distance remained the same in all photos of approximately 250 feet away.

Stump 100% Crop at 28mm

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Stump 100% Crop at 500mm

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Resized Pics

28mm

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35mm

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50mm

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70mm

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105mm

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200mm

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300mm

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500mm

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Most cameras today advertise their lenses as xxmm-xxmm equivalent if it's a zoom lens. So if your point-and-shoot says it's 50-150mm equivalent you'll get photos comparative to the ones above taken at 50mm on the short end and bigger than the 105mm but smaller than the 200mm shots. If you have one of the top of the line new point and shoots you may approach the 500mm shot. These are not exact numbers for the lenses I used. My camera is the Canon XTi which is not a full frame sensor. The lenses are calibrated for full frame cameras so when it says 500mm using my camera with a smaller sensor I'm actually equivalent to approximately an 800mm lens.

Now if your digital camera is not a zoom camera most likely your pictures will be in the 28-35mm range equivalent.

One other thing I'd like to mention, Lenses can be expensive and actually cost many times more than what you pay for your camera when it comes to DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) style cameras. Canon's lenses when you get to 400mm and longer start at over $1,000 and go to over $100,000. Canon's biggest lens is the 1200mm F/5.6 and recently a well known photo supply store had a used one on sale for ONLY $99,000!! Brand new they sell for $120,000!

The lens I use for my 500mm shots right now is a cheapie. It's a mirror style lens that a lot of people don't like due to some things specific to mirror lenses. The "Bokeh" or appearance of the background. With mirror lenses if there are bright spots in the background it might look appear like floating doughnuts floating around. Just watch your background and you'll be fine if that bothers you. The model I have is an f/6.3 which means it gathers more light making it easier to see through the viewfinder and focus compared to most others at f/8.0. The depth of field is very narrow, and a slight touch of the focus ring can go from sharp focus to blurry. Today's cameras are designed to be used for auto focus lenses and the viewfinder has no tools to help with manual focus, at least not Canon.

It is a manual focus only lens, so it takes some getting use to and I've been playing with it for about a week and getting a little better every day. To me it's the difference to possibly a pic and no pic due to the increased focal length. For the most part the pictures I've taken are acceptable, not pro quality but if I was a pro I'd have one of the $100,000 plus lenses and not have to worry about it.

Very good information for beginners Moregon. What inspired you to post this? The new lens?

I have a professional photog friend who lets me borrow some of his lenses and keep them for a few weeks at a time. Right now I have a 10.5mm 'fish eye' lens and a 60mm macro lens I am using. The macro sells for around $500-600. I really like it, and may buy one someday, if I can save up enough for it.

We are Nikon guys, but I have great respect for Canon cameras and lenses too. To me the two systems are almost exactly the same as far as quality.

Actually I had an idea to do it a while ago, but the new lens gave me a wider range of focal lengths to compare. With today's cameras saying things like 5x and 10x people automatically assume they'll get BIG ZOOM RESULTS and that's just not the truth. 50mm has always been the equivalent to human eyesight when it comes to lenses. So what you see through a 50mm lens approximates what a normal human sees with their own eyes. If the camera only has an 18mm lens and has 10x zoom sure the picture will be 10x bigger than a non-zoom picture taken with that camera. But it's only equivalent to 180mm or a little more than 3x human sight. For an 18mm lens to get comparative pictures to a 500mm lens that camera would need about a 28x zoom factor.


Edited to add:

The primary reason I went with Canon is because I have lenses from my film SLR for Canon. I do agree when it comes to Canon and Nikon they are very close in quality. If it hadn't been for the lenses I already had I may very well have gone Nikon this time around.

Same here. I think most of us SLR users did this when we switched over to digital. Why invest in all new lenses for a different system?