puckhead193 said:
alright, i'm confused. i *want* a new digital camera, the one i have now is great, light, takes great pics etc....but i want to experiment with advance features........ i was thinking of getting a nikon d70, cause it seams about a nice price for what it is and seams much better then the drebel. My concern is that will it be to adavance and make me frustrated. I don't much on how to use the advance features.... I don't understand the whole lens thing (28-100mm f/3.5-5.6 Zoom Lens..what does that mean english....if this was to advance then i was thinking of getting the Konica Minolta Dimage A2 or the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-F828 or if i go with the DSLR which is better Canon EOS 20D, Nikon D70, Canon EOS 10D...
I'm not that big on photoshop, i order elements 3.0 which is waiting for me at home when i get done with school...
A DSLR doesn't have to be difficult. It will take time to learn everything, but that's the same with any higher end camera. However, it can always be run in full auto to start out with so all you have to do is point and shoot, and most (I know the D70 does) still have the preset controls for landscapes, portraits, night shots, etc, just like a point & shoot cam would have. I don't think the D70 would be a great deal more to learn on than the A2 or 828 (which I own). There's a pretty good manual that comes with the cam, and you can gradually work your way into different manual features (shutter priority, aperture priority, exposure compensation, white balance, etc etc). Besides that, if you really enjoy photography, you're going to want a camera you can REALLY grow into. While the A2/828 have a lot of room for this, they have some serious limitations, and you may find yourself regretting the decision down the road. There isn't that much of a price difference afterall.
As for the lens talk: 28-100mm f/3.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
This means the range of the camera is 28mm-100mm, which would be a 3.5x optical zoom (100/28 = 3.5, roughly). 28mm is a good wide-angle, so you can fit a lot into the picture. 100mm is a decent length zoom to start out with, it will give you some room to get closer to your subject, but not by a great deal. There are plenty of picture sets online that show the differences between the different zoom lengths (different millimeters). The f/3.5-5.6 is the minimum aperture at wide-angle and tele (zoom). The aperture is a round opening that lets light in, and can be made larger or smaller. f/3.5-5.6 means that at the widest angle (28mm) the widest the apeture can open to is f/3.5 and at the longest zoom (100mm), the largest the aperture can open is f/5.6. These are kind of high apertures (meaning small openings). The larger the opening (thus the smaller the f number) the faster the lens can pick up light. It also changes the depth of field (how much of the background is in focus). When you see portraits where the person is in focus but the background is blurry, it's because the photography was using a low f-stop (usually f/2)
Now to confuse you a little more, Digital SLR's have a field of view crop, because their sensors aren't the normal 35mm that lenses are calibrated to. For the D70, the FoV crop is 1.6x. Basically you just multiply whatever the lens says by 1.6. So the 28-100mm becomes about a 44.8-160mm lens when you put it on the D70. You lose a lot of wide-angle, but you gain some tele (zoom). I believe the crop for the Digital Rebel is 1.5x.
On more thing, just to make sure you'd understand what you're getting into. Most, if not all, DSLRs require occassional cleaning of the sensor due to dust accumulations (since the lens isn't soldered on, it has less protection from dust). It's not a difficult procedure, and there are tons of websites showing how to do it.
Hmm, that's all I can think of. Hope this helps at all.
BTW- check out places like
www.dpreview.com and
www.luminous-landscape.com, they're full of tutorials on everything from how to compose a picture to how to set all your manual controls to how to edit everything on the computer (mainly the latter website, luminous-landscape, which is actually devoted almost entirely to DSLRs)
