I loved my Zenit 122k.
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Yeah but if you take the average entry level dslr and put it up against a 4000 camera, typically those cameras come without a lens. And its not like you can take decent pictures without one, so the equivalent lens to the entry level one should still outperform it in the extreme ends of focal length. Including having much nicer bokeh
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Macro and zoom are pretty much all the lens. And some lenses are “faster” than others, letting in more light by opening their aperture wider. (Some lenses also give noticeably better looking images than others, but that gets very slippery very quickly.)
But picking up an image in low light without a lot of noise, that’s absolutely the body. And for both dark and light scenes, the more expensive cameras tend to have a higher dynamic range which is, very roughly, the possible range between highlight and shadow.
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Nice pics. How did you know that cape buffalo was elderly? Was he yelling at clouds?
A good way to blow your budget as a photographer is to get into bird photography.
Sure, the nikon p1000 is cheap, but you’d get better results with a 600 mm f4 lens, and a body especially designed to photograph birds in flight, and a tripod designed to stabilize the whole bloody mess. Is it worth tens of thousands of dollars? That sort of depends whether you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on your hobby…
Product photography? It depends on your standards, but elaborate lighting setups tend to make more of a difference than either lens or sensor. Sometimes, a more advanced camera can make it easier to control all the speedlights and strobes, but only if you buy into e.g Nikon’s Creative Lighting System. If you need true macro capabilities, you can either buy extension tubes and reverse ring gadgets, or you can get a quite expensive long macro prime. The short macro lenses-- 55mm, 60 mm even 40mm are cheap, but they alo come with lighting “challenges” and aren’t that useful for live subjects. Be sure that your camera supports tethered liveview so that you can fine tune the focus. (I suppose you can also use a EVF, but that rather depends on whether you like being hunched over).
Sometimes it feels like the more expensive bodies are simply a license to spend more money on the necessary accessories required to actually use the more esoteric features. If your lens is slow to focus, it doesn’t matter that your body has 9 different autofocus modes for tracking birds.On the other hand, if you anticipate needing to regularly use ISO 10,000, the latest “full frame” and “medium format” bodies can be attractive in their own right.
Also, that video was filmed in 4k, using external microphones. It might have even used an autofocusing lens. The lower end camera bodies fall flat on their asses here. No 4k. No external jacks for a microphone (though this would be kind of usless without a way to control gain), no fancy dual pixel cmos.
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Holga was the hip thing when I was in art school. Pretty similar, but probably crappier.
My dad was a pro photographer, and when I was 12 he gave me a Leica IIC, one of the early 35mm with screw-thread lenses. Bit of a pain to load, but amazing quality. I believe, if you can stand to use film (I can’t) they’re still pretty good deals.
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did you use a lot of telephoto lenses?
You aren’t going to buy a Zed seven, then are you?
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I used a Zenit B when I took photography in college. They had an iron plate in the bottom of the body to make it feel solid and damp vibration. I shot some amazing images, learned a whole lot about photography and figured out what I wanted in my next camera. It was the perfect camera to learn with. I think it cost $67 CDN with a 58mm f2.0 lens and leather neverready case.
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It looked like me, when I was a kid, trying to fix/improve my toys.
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The Helios lens is very good. It was a surprise for me. You can buy a cheap chinese ring adapter and use it in a fancy DSLR.
It is not very difficult to find these lenses. I think you can find the Helios in the famous thrift stores, church-organized bazaars, yard sales or used photographic material stores and websites. The problem is to find a good lens without fungi.
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Yep… came here to say exactly this. Still life images with reasonable light levels. Is like putting Tiger Woods against a mid level golfer on a mini golf course and then feigning shock their scores were close.
I had a friend that worked in a digital photo-lab that did high-end prints (i.e. Not Walmart). He told me he could usually identify what camera people were using by looking at image artifacts/distortion/etc. across a few images in a set (which he could often verify from the EFIX data). I tested him on a phone and of course he couldn’t, to prove me wrong he had me stick a few images on a USB drive and pulled it up on a bigger screen where he could zoom, etc. He proved himself quickly.
That anecdote of course isn’t about image quality; but the point is the same.
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While the god of the Old Testament does explicitly forbid the creation of any kind of image of things on Earth (Exodus 20:4 and many other places), it doesn’t say that it is because it steals souls.
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True, but that can come down to the lenses more than the camera body. If you can spring for a high-grade f/1.0 lens, you can take extra-low-light shots that might otherwise be impossible.
On the other hand, there are point-and-shoots that have mighty fine glass (see also: the Panasonic/Leica relationship).
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Or you can get both, getting a fast lens and a low noise full frame camera that lets you shoot at higher ISOs, and take low light shots that are double plus unpossible!
It’s not one or the other, IMO, because there’s not much point to paying thousands for a full frame body and then putting lackluster glass on it.
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Heh. I picked up one of Panasonic’s “poor man’s Leicas” (a DMC-ZS40) a few years ago, and it has given me some fantastic shots. Hmmm… I need to set up a Flickr/Shutterstock/something-not-Facebook account. 
Or, better yet, set up a Nextcloud somewhere for posting photos.
You have some nice shots on that link!
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I’ve got an m4/3 camera I got right when they came out, and a 300mm (60mm equivalent) zoom, that I get pretty good bird photos with. No tripod necessary. It’s not quite as fast as what you’re describing, but you’ll get way more shots of birds in flight from not needing a tripod to stabilize it. I think it more than makes up for the lower ISO and autofocus.
m4/3 has a very nice 1:1 (2:1 equivalent) 95mm equivalent prime. That format is actually better for macro, because of the increased DOF over full-frame.
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