After a smallish camera to take lots of photographs of the children

Actually its the other way around. You wont get the same perspective being lazy using a zoom at its 105 mm setting as walking up to your subject with a 35mm as there is a reason the smaller focallenghts, 28-50mm was/is the choice of most succesfull street photographing. The relationship between field of view and perspective of wider focallenghts at their "sweetspot" for people photographing is what draws the viewer into the pic and the story rather than seeing it from a distance so you cant just stay put zoom your lens and get thats pic.
I dont remember who said "No great photo was ever taken with a tele lens"

You're barking mad aren't you? :D

It's not about being lazy or not. It's about the picture you want, if that draws people in or not or what focal length you like or don't is subjective and I'm not getting into that here as you're changing the goal posts and introducing arguments to justify a misguided statement.

All I'm doing here is correcting the notion that you can zoom with your feet which is clearly misguided.

The simple fact is that if you look at a scene and are happy with it that includes the camera to subject distance which decides the perspective. Fill the frame with your subject with a 200mm lens and then walk up to your subject and fill the frame with a 20mm lens to get the same framing and that'll give you a rather extreme example of why the statement "zoom with your feet" is misguided.

As a little experiment to show that it's camera to subject distance that decides the perspective not focal length try this...

Stand still... take a shot of something with a long lens and without moving point your camera in the same direction again and take the shot with a shorter focal length. Now walk closer with the shorter focal length until you match the framing of the longer lens and take the shot yet again.

What you'll have now is three pictures.

1 Long length shot.
2 Short focal length shot.
3 Short length shot but matching the framing of the long lens.

You will now find that you can crop shot 2 to make it look like shot 1, other than the resolution you've lost in cropping, but you'll still be able to see that the perspective is exactly the same :D You will also see that the perspective of shot 3 is completely different to the other two shots.

If anyone thinks that zooming with your feet is the same as changing focal length please try that little experiment and see if it changes your mind :D
 
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I have hundreds of shots of my grand nieces taken with the Canon 350D and the Canon 50mm F1.8 indoors at 1600 ISO and then put through Neat Image to lower the noise.

Also loads taken outdoors at lower ISOs and with various lenses, often the 28-135mm IS USM lens.

Getting focus is just a matter of practice and binning the bad ones!:)

The Canon 50mm F1.8 is brilliant from f2.8 onwards with quality that easily matches an "L" glass lens.
 
Christ my 71 year old mother can photograph kids running around with a £80 compact let alone a Leica lol

She does alright. She was getting in focus sharp shots in the mid 1980`s with cheap film cameras. She still has them on the wall.

I'm a bit older than your mother. In the 1980s I was doing my best to get good sharp in focus shots with an SLR, and discovering the virtues of mirror lock-up. Back in those days my standard of good sharpness was an A4 print looking fairly sharp when checked out with a magnifying glass. In fact it wasn't just camera focus I had to worry about. I had to be pretty careful with enlarger focus too, using one of those nifty little grain magnifying focus microscopes. The cheap film cameras of the day -- at least those that I was familiar with -- couldn't approach that. There were a few rather good compacts which certainly could, but they weren't cheap.

Ten years ago I converted myself to a DSLR. As the resolution of my camera's sensors and my lenses kept increasing over the years I kept finding that my previously learnt skills for acquiring sharp focus and detail resolution were inadequate. Now, with today's skills and lenses etc., on a good day with the appropriate gear I can more easily produce sharp A3 prints than I used to be able to produce sharp A4 prints. I suspect therefore that I have, and in the 1980s had, higher standards of sharpness than you and your Mum. Nothing wrong with your standards. What is acceptable sharpness is a matter of personal taste. The point is that the OP's posts suggest that she too has a higher standard of acceptable sharpness than you or your Mum.

When I have my cataracts removed in a year or few it won't surprise me if I get even fussier about sharpness and detail resolution than I am now. I'm looking forward to 100MP sensors :)
 
You're barking mad aren't you? :D
Youre not even close :D
It's not about being lazy or not. It's about the picture you want, if that draws people in or not or what focal length you like or don't is subjective and I'm not getting into that here as you're changing the goal posts and introducing arguments to justify a misguided statement.
Its exactly about choosing the focallenghts thats will give you the image you want. If you want the "tele perspective" you choose a tele lens and need to move back to frame your shot if your subject is to close and if you want the including perspective of wide to normal lenses thats what you choose then needing to move closer if your subject is to far away. What Im addressing is the zoom part, the laziness unfortunately often seen where people crop the scene by zoom instead of moving to the proper distance to get the best perspective.
All I'm doing here is correcting the notion that you can zoom with your feet which is clearly misguided.

The simple fact is that if you look at a scene and are happy with it that includes the camera to subject distance which decides the perspective. Fill the frame with your subject with a 200mm lens and then walk up to your subject and fill the frame with a 20mm lens to get the same framing and that'll give you a rather extreme example of why the statement "zoom with your feet" is misguided.

As a little experiment to show that it's camera to subject distance that decides the perspective not focal length try this...

Stand still... take a shot of something with a long lens and without moving point your camera in the same direction again and take the shot with a shorter focal length. Now walk closer with the shorter focal length until you match the framing of the longer lens and take the shot yet again.

What you'll have now is three pictures.

1 Long length shot.
2 Short focal length shot.
3 Short length shot but matching the framing of the long lens.

You will now find that you can crop shot 2 to make it look like shot 1, other than the resolution you've lost in cropping, but you'll still be able to see that the perspective is exactly the same :D You will also see that the perspective of shot 3 is completely different to the other two shots.

If anyone thinks that zooming with your feet is the same as changing focal length please try that little experiment and see if it changes your mind :D
Im fully aware of how distance affects perspective and have seen those shots. Thats why Im turning that argument around. If you need that certain kind of pic, compressed perspective or wide open you choose the appellantens focallenght and eventually youll have to move around to frame your shot, zoom with your feet. Simply turning the zoom ring results in a different image
 
Its exactly about choosing the focallenghts thats will give you the image you want. If you want the "tele perspective" you choose a tele lens and need to move back to frame your shot if your subject is to close and if you want the including perspective of wide to normal lenses thats what you choose then needing to move closer if your subject is to far away. What Im addressing is the zoom part, the laziness unfortunately often seen where people crop the scene by zoom instead of moving to the proper distance to get the best perspective.

Im fully aware of how distance affects perspective and have seen those shots. Thats why Im turning that argument around. If you need that certain kind of pic, compressed perspective or wide open you choose the appellantens focallenght and eventually youll have to move around to frame your shot, zoom with your feet. Simply turning the zoom ring results in a different image

I'm not going to reply other than...

There is no compressed tele perspective or wide perspective. There's only one perspective regardless of what lens you have and it's decided by where you're standing. Move (or if your subject moves) and there's still only one perspective but this time it's a different one because you've moved, or your subject has. Other than that you're not mad, you're completely barmy :D But that's ok :D
 
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If you want the same quality as the 5D in low light, but you want it small/light... then Leica Q Typ 116 is the camera for you.

If you can compromise a bit, and don't want to spend that amount.. X100 range...

These are both fixed focal length though.

I was looking at the RX100 vs LX100 and went for the Panasonic.

Then there's six million thousand hundred options with interchangeable 4/3rd systems...
 
I'm not going to reply other than...

There is no compressed tele perspective or wide perspective. There's only one perspective regardless of what lens you have and it's decided by where you're standing. Move (or if your subject moves) and there's still only one perspective but this time it's a different one because you've moved, or your subject has. Other than that you're not mad, you're completely barmy :D But that's ok :D
Can we at least agree that a shot taken with a wideangle relatively close shows more space in debth between elements and a shot with a tele from a distance a lot less space in debth, that things in the tele shot pools to be a lot closer to each other, the mountain look huge and close by where the wide shows it as small far away? There may not be a tele or wide perspective but it does follow the distance dictated by the field of view for the subject matter hence my choice of words.
BTW so were both members of the loony club :)
 
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Thank you all for your contributions and debates ;) I went out and bought a fujifilm x100F from Camulet today, had a little play and boy it is hard work to learn to be fixed focal length, love shooting without a flash and my kids indoors with no light I guess do need flash. Will post a photo soon
 
Great, have fun with it, happy shooting and don't forget to post some of your photos for us all to see! :)
 
Thank you all for your contributions and debates ;) I went out and bought a fujifilm x100F from Camulet today, had a little play and boy it is hard work to learn to be fixed focal length, love shooting without a flash and my kids indoors with no light I guess do need flash. Will post a photo soon


Nice choice :) I had the older X100S for a while and was always sorry that I sold it on. I had no problem going to ISO 3200 with it, sure you get a little grain but the images still had a clean feel to them. I would imagine the X100F is even better for low light.

Here's an old one I took at ISO 4000 and changed nothing but a little WB adjust in post:
Fuji X100s tester2 by Enticing Imagery, on Flickr

Now ... just zoom with your feet .... :whistle::ROFLMAO:

I never thought people actually took that phrase literally until this very thread.
 
& there you go with people disappearing up their own arses... The OP was asking a fairly reasonable & basic question?
 
Thank you all for your contributions and debates ;) I went out and bought a fujifilm x100F from Camulet today, had a little play and boy it is hard work to learn to be fixed focal length, love shooting without a flash and my kids indoors with no light I guess do need flash. Will post a photo soon
Great camera, you can buy a wide and tele converter for these. Might save you some shoe leather :)
 
Great camera, you can buy a wide and tele converter for these. Might save you some shoe leather :)

if your happy to shoot Jpegs then you can save yourself money by using the inbuilt converters.though of course you would still need the WCL
 
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& there you go with people disappearing up their own arses... The OP was asking a fairly reasonable & basic question?

I think we gave him some solid suggestions in between. You'll always get the know it alls besides
 
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