Can I shoot professional photos with a small beginner digital camera?

That's a nice soundbite but the fact is that the gear can limit what you can do with it.

Just a couple of examples, my first digital camera was useless for anything moving, absolutely useless, and all of my Canon DSLR's gave noise when I even thought about boosting the shadows and before anyone suggests exposing for the shadows would have done the trick just imagine what that does to the highlights :D Exposure bracketing could be an option but certainly not for anything moving. So there are limits.

It's not always down to the person, sometimes the fact is that you can't do what you want with some kit.
 
That's true, but with all cameras no matter how technical, one has to work within their limitations to get the best out of them... Remember todays all signing and dancing camera may have added bells and whistles, but earlier incarnations are just as good... the 5D being an example, the MK1 version still rocks IMHO.

Often camera wise the important thing isn't the body but the glass, you can have the best camera in the word, but if the lens is incapable of putting a clear, accurate, well lit and sharp image to the sensor, you might as well be using a £10 body.

Remember New Daz washes whiter than white, but then so did old Daz and the Daz before that... if it didn't and they didn't extol that virtue, we would never have bought it in the first place.... the same goes for cameras. ( For those in the Colonies, DAZ is a washing powder used for clothing )
 
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... the 5D being an example, the MK1 version still rocks IMHO.

Yes, it is fantastic if your subject is a well lit still life - which is exactly what it was designed for.

If the subject moves faster than walking pace or requires an ISO above 1600, pick another camera.
 
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That's true, but with all cameras no matter how technical, one has to work within their limitations to get the best out of them... Remember todays all signing and dancing camera may have added bells and whistles, but earlier incarnations are just as good... the 5D being an example, the MK1 version still rocks IMHO.

Often camera wise the important thing isn't the body but the glass, you can have the best camera in the word, but if the lens is incapable of putting a clear, accurate, well lit and sharp image to the sensor, you might as well be using a £10 body.

Remember New Daz washes whiter than white, but then so did old Daz and the Daz before that... if it didn't and they didn't extol that virtue, we would never have bought it in the first place.... the same goes for cameras. ( For those in the Colonies, DAZ is a washing powder used for clothing )

It's not the bells and whistles that make modern cameras better than older ones - it's the improvements in sensor technology and autofocus that make them better. It's not that old cameras were bad, but those aspects particularly limited their ability to support the photographer in their attempts to make pictures.
 
Yes, it is fantastic if your subject is a well lit still life - which is exactly what it was designed for.

If the subject moves faster than walking pace or requires an ISO above 1600, pick another camera.

By todays standards maybe but at the time I had a 5D I thought it was a good camera and ISO 3200 produced perfectly useable pictures but with a f1.4 I was stuck at 1/xx shutter speeds for night time pictures.
 
That's true, but with all cameras no matter how technical, one has to work within their limitations to get the best out of them... Remember todays all signing and dancing camera may have added bells and whistles, but earlier incarnations are just as good... the 5D being an example, the MK1 version still rocks IMHO.

Often camera wise the important thing isn't the body but the glass, you can have the best camera in the word, but if the lens is incapable of putting a clear, accurate, well lit and sharp image to the sensor, you might as well be using a £10 body.

Remember New Daz washes whiter than white, but then so did old Daz and the Daz before that... if it didn't and they didn't extol that virtue, we would never have bought it in the first place.... the same goes for cameras. ( For those in the Colonies, DAZ is a washing powder used for clothing )

I'm trying to think what the worst lens I've used is... I'll have to have a think about that one but I'm struggling to think of a lens that's that bad.

I do have some lenses that I got cheap, film era 50mm f1.8's spring to mind. They're getting popular now and prices seem to have risen but a while ago you could get mass market 50mm f1.8's for £15. In their day they were relatively expensive things but a cheap one on a mirrorlsss camera today will get you perfectly acceptable sharpness and will possibly only show itself up when compared to modern lenses at its widest apertures.
 
It's not the bells and whistles that make modern cameras better than older ones - it's the improvements in sensor technology and autofocus that make them better. It's not that old cameras were bad, but those aspects particularly limited their ability to support the photographer in their attempts to make pictures.

I think like a lot of technology more modern cameras make it easier for more people to do more things acceptably well.

Just a few years ago if anyone had told me a mass market camera going for a reasonable price would focus accurately anywhere in the frame, lock onto a face or even an eye and follow it as it moved about the frame and take useable pictures at ISO 25,600 I'd have thrown money at them.

The big changes for me are that I can now take non flash pictures in just about any light and probably have a good chance of avoiding movement blur (I'm not stuck at 1/xx at ISO 3200,) I can manually focus very accurately and I have consistent AF with which I can take truly candid "snap shot" pictures at wide apertures which will be in focus much much more often than not.
 
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I think like a lot of technology more modern cameras make it easier for more people to do more things acceptably well.

Just a few years ago if anyone had told me a mass market camera going for a reasonable price would focus accurately anywhere in the frame, lock onto a face or even an eye and follow it as it moved about the frame and take useable pictures at ISO 25,600 I'd have thrown money at them.

The big changes for me are that I can now take non flash pictures in just about any light and probably have a good chance of avoiding movement blur (I'm not stuck at 1/xx at ISO 3200,) I can manually focus very accurately and I have consistent AF with which I can take truly candid "snap shot" pictures at wide apertures which will be in focus much much more often than not.

To me, the thing about not using the capabilities of a modern camera comes from a failure to understand what photography is about. A cameras capability is nothing to do with additional functions that have no purpose for most people in most situations, but rather everything to do with the aspects they use most of the time. Thus most people will find a camera that gives noisy photos at ISO800 or more will distinctly limit their ability to take pictures - they will have exceeded the cameras capabilities in their requirements. Likewise if the AF of the camera cannot track an object moving towards the camera. No-one in their right mind will give a wet slap about the in-camera software's ability to perform selective colour processing or to swap out one colour for another after a picture has been taken.

I'm reminded of a comment in the Sony A7 thread, where someone has been amazed at the way their keeper-rate had increased because the AF worked almost all the time. Cameras are starting to have capabilities that can exceed the photographers requirements,
 
I used to have 2 SLRs until I decided to go digital and and take the simple route. I got a fixed lens 3mp (when 3mp was a lot of pixels) point and shoot camera. Wasn't long before I wanted a 7.5mp supercompact (as brige cameras were called at the time) which did everything I wanted and the 15X zoom took it that bit further.

After a few years I felt like moving on and getting back it to photography and wanted to delve in to post processing RAW so the bridge camera, while still being a great camera, it could not hack it with no RAW output and zoom control being 2 buttons I found getting the correct zoom a bit tricky.

Time to move on to an entry level DSLR with RAW, interchangeable lenses and 3.5 fps. More than enough for me. again after several years of this serving me well, and still does, except that my range of photography subjects has expanded and while the entry lever DSLR can be used for most it falls down on the fps/write speed/buffering I hit its limit in a couple of features.

I was attempting to take a photo which required 6 fps and the ability to write/buffer them all without freezing as the entry level DSLR would just about get 4 photos in the available time before the buffer filled, camera froze & I missed the last 2 shots meaning the project failed. Even with a bigger buffer or faster write speed I would still have missed the last 2-3 shots as I had just over 1 second to get 6 images.

There is no way that I had mastered all the features the camera had and other than the above the camera would have been good enough for many more years.

Looking at the available cameras there were some that I could only drool over but they would have been like getting a Subaru Impreza to commute 1 mile each way to work. I settled on an enthusiastic's camera that would cope with ease, have added features like high iso & more focus points which although I don't need at the moment will allow me to progress further if I want to in the future. I can't foresee me needing to update in the future unless something drastic happens with the new camera.

In some cases the camera will drive the photographer's needs, others the photographers needs will drive camera choice but for the most part all cameras give good or great photos if the photographer's needs fall with the limitations of the camera and IMHO if the images fail to impress the photographer they have only themselves to blame for either using the wrong tool for the job or using the tool incorrectly.
 
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