What camera should I buy?

Okay, so you’ve got your tickets, got your visas, made your plans, the world’s at your feet. Now you have to make sure that when you come back, the world’s legendary places will be recorded on eye-catching, high-impact-value 8x6 prints that will make your friends stand there in bewilderment, silently worshiping you for your talented recording of the exotic, the astonishing, the eerie and the humorous.

You want to buy a camera that will let you do that. Well here’s a little secret:

ANY camera will let you do that.

As long as it works. The only thing that can practically hinder you from taking great photos is a broken camera. The rest are details. There are numerous options, and your choice will be a matter of style, preference, technical issues and available cash.

The key point to remember is that photography is a creative process, and while the tools enable it, ultimately, it’s you that takes the photographs and not the camera. With recent advancements in consumer technology, almost any new camera (and many-many old ones, too) will expose good enough photos. Whether or not your photos end up on the National Geographic coffe-table yearbook, depends mainly on what you shoot, why you shoot it, when and from where you shoot it. These are all camera-independent issues to a great extent.

So, the ultimate answer to the ‘what camera’ question is: “A reliable one”

The key issues that the non-professional travel photographer has to deal with in the camera store are the following:

Film or Digital?

The answer is to go digital. For the average consumer, the benefits are immense. Most mid-priced digital cameras in the market today are good enough to produce fine-looking standard-size prints and decent-looking 8x6 enlargements. Digital memory/storage has become dirt cheap. Computer interfacing has become standardized and easy to use. Best of all, you can find computer facilities at internet cafes all over the world to share your photos, upload them for safe keeping or burn them on CDs. The immediate feedback that digital cameras provide lets you have fun with your photos on-the-spot, discard the lousy ones, and re-shoot to get the right result. Digital opens up whole new chapters for creativity and sharing of experiences, and the drawbacks with respect to film are mostly insignificant to the average traveler. There are many good reasons why for some people film is still the way to go, but you’d know already if you were one of those people. So, that one’s out the window.

Are SLR cameras for me?

The SLR (Single-Lens Reflex) interchangeable lens cameras offer you a greater degree of versatility than most point-and-shoot models. They allow you to work with a variety of lenses and they give you more control in taking pictures. If your intention is to learn photography and exercise your technical and creative skills, then you will appreciate the ability to manually focus, to adjust aperture and shutter speed, and to try a variety of focal lengths and filters. An SLR is a good learning tool. That being said, an SLR does not immediately give you any advantage in terms of picture quality. On the contrary, most SLR kits come with low-quality zoom lenses which are much worse that the lenses that point-and-shoots commonly have built-in. Unless you are going to build an arsenal of good (and expensive) lenses and filters, all while acquiring technical skills to expolit them, you’re probably better of going for a point-and-shoot.

Form Factor

The size and form of you camera affect your photography, perhaps more than you would imagine. Especially when traveling. Great photographic opportunities quite often arise in the most unexpected of circumstances. A lightweight and compact camera is more likely to be in your pocket at any given moment. You’re less likely to be carrying a bulky camera when biking, or climbing a mountain, or at the beach, or at the local bar. And if you do carry it along in any of those situations, you’d be wishing you had a smaller camera. If you’re the kind of person who would not compromise on the benefits of an SLR for a compact point-and-shoot, you might want to consider a small and inexpensive second piece of gear. Another point to consider with respect to size and form is discreetness. You are more likely to draw attention to yourself while shooting a street scene if you’re wielding a pro-looking SLR and a huge telephoto lens.

Ergonomics

Before you buy a camera you should spend some time with it. Handle it, try the most common actions. Make sure it looks comfortable, easy and natural to use. When you’re shooting you want to be able to react quickly to something that is happening, you want to think about what you’re shooting, not how you’re shooting it.