Tuesday, September 3, 2013

photography gear 1 - the camera


if you wanna get started in photography, what equipment do you need? to answer that question, you must first know what type of photography you want to get into. different types of equipment are suitable for different types of photography. the camera that you will need, the lens or lens assortment that will make your job easy, whether you’re gonna need on-camera flash, a studio flash outfit or whether you’re gonna rely solely on natural light, all that depends on what you wanna do. there are other accessories that may be handy depending on the types of pictures that you wanna take. but most certainly, you’re gonna need a camera. so let’s start with that basic gear.

the camera
the camera is an electro-mechanical box that is designed to capture light. how a picture is created depends on the type of camera. a film camera records a latent image on a film which needs to be processed for the picture to show. a digital camera on the other hand has a sensor that captures light and records it as pixels that are stored on memory chip. unlike film, the picture recorded on a memory chip is readily usable without further need for processing. another aspect of digital photography is that memory is volatile, which means that the recorded image can be erased without leaving any traces. the sensor alone would be useless as it need a storage medium for the virtual image to be accessed. film has limits in the number of microscopic grains that record the image. a sensor also has a maximum amount of virtual grains that it can capture. the amount of virtual grains - pixels - that a sensor can records is referred to as the resolution of the camera. camera resolution is usually expressed in megapixels - one megapixel is one million pixels. by today’s standards, a decent camera will hold about 10 to 12 megapixels.