Choosing a Camera (Help)

[Hamzah A]

Hi,

Im a noob to photography but im interested in macro photography. But first I need a camera. Ive been looking at the Canon eos 550D (budget of around £300), however i was wondering if anyone can advise me on if there is better or what i should be looking for.

Thanks
H

 

[dizidav]

I would suggest you get to a camera store and have a look at whats available, try them out see if they fit your hands, where all the buttons are, if you can cope with hte menu systems, find out how much lenses are for the subject you want to explore before you buy.

 

[snerkler]

For this price point you Nikon really have the trump card in terms of sensor performance and beat the Canons in every way, and what will be quite important for you for macro in terms of the sensor is ISO performance.

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Canon-EOS-550D-versus-Nikon-D3200___645_801


With macro you generally use very small apertures which means light is restricted leading to the need of higher ISO and therefore more noise/grain in the image. As you can see the Nikon is considerably better in ISO performance. Of course you can combat this with flash/lighting, although sometimes you still need to ramp ISO up. For example here's a couple I took with flash but ISO was still at 1250 and 1000.


DSC_8785 by TDG-77, on Flickr

DSC_9587 by TDG-77, on Flickr



However, on saying all of this what is the most important is that you get on with the camera and I would always advise that you try a few out first and see which you prefer in terms of button placement, menus etc etc. For me this is ultimately more important than the tech specs.

 

[woof woof]

I'm not into macro so you might want to ignore everything I'm about to say

You don't say what you already have so I'm going to assume you don't have anything and need everything. If that's the case it'll depend on what you want to shoot and the quality you're aiming for but you may struggle to do this in budget especially if going for a macro lens.

With a limited budget I think I'd look at a used compact system camera, not at DSLR, and a macro lens from the film days. I'd do it this way because macro is usually manual focus and therefore buying an old manual focus lens wont put you at a disadvantage and an EVF equipped compact system camera will allow you to manually focus very accurately. You will also possibly need a tripod and lighting... so the costs soon mount up... but an older generation compact system camera could be under £100, maybe, and an old macro lens could be another £100 or possibly less leaving you £100 or more for a used tripod, head and lighting. Is it doable in budget? I honestly don't know. You might also consider focus stacking and might need some software but there might be some free software on the net somewhere.

To keep costs down you could also look at macro tubes, close up filters or reversing a lens... depending how applicable these things are to what and how you want to shoot.

I hope I've helped but maybe I haven't.