DSLR vs phone camera
I'm going travelling in a week or two and decided to dig out my old Canon 350D dslr, from the early days of consumer digital cameras before the rise of the smartphone.
It's definitely older than I remember, although maybe so am I! 8 mega pixel, with a 512Mb compact flash card.
On the other hand, I have a perfectly serviceable OnePlus 7T, obviously newer, not cutting edge any more but fine.
What do people think? Go retro or stick to the modern?
You are likely bringing your phone with you anyhow, so the big question is whether you find the dedicated camera worth lugging around.
When I have my DSLR in hand my eyes go into shooting mode. I start looking for good subjects and compositions everywhere.
I may still not be the best at photography, but walking around feeling the camera in my hand, feeling the mechanical shutter, having to think about how to get the exposure I want.. It just sets me in the right mindset to enjoy photography.
Do you enjoy shooting with your phone? Some people do, I don't. There is no right or wrong answer here :)
This to me is the biggest consideration. Are you taking a trip where it’s worth the extra effort with a separate camera? Going someplace I’ve never been before where there will really be opportunities as a tourist to take out the camera and try to get nice photos? Yes. Going someplace where the main goals are to sit by a pool/ocean/lake, enjoy good foods and drinks, just relax? I’m only bringing my phone and hopefully won’t use it too much.
Yeah, this is why I thought of it - going to Uzbekistan to see some of the of silk road sites, it feels like it deserves something special!
I've been using my phone for photography for so long, I don't really know! I downloaded all my photos off my of phone and it made me realise how rarely I actually look at them! Just take the photo, move on.
The reason I don't use phone cameras, is the fixed focal length doesn't work for me. Digital zoom sucks.
Unless you don't have the space to pack 350D and lenses. Take it with you.
I'm relatively space constrained, so would just take the standard lens that came with it, a Canon EFS 18-55mm
Counterpoint: I make a point of carrying a dedicated camera with me most places on the weekend, but unusual have a 35mm or 50mm prime on it unless I'm shooting youth sports.
I'd give it a test run before you set off and make sure things like the batteries are up to expectations.
Go for a day trip in your own city and put it through its paces rather than pack it and figure out something isn't as expected on day 1 of the fortnight trip.
8megapixels is low, but I reckon it'll still make good A4 prints.
Canon glass will give better raw photos, but then you'll have to do the postprocessing manually. Maybe there's some AI auto photo processing thing out there, IDK. Also you'd have to carry that thing around. OnePlus should do at least a passable attempt at postprocessing, so it's definitely less work. But the tiny lens and sensor mean your image quality ceiling is much lower. Is the 7T the one with the cool pop up selfie cam?
I have a soft bricked 9T with a pop up selfie cam. I really miss that feature.
No, the 7T is just a standard glass rectangle, nothing funky.
What kind of post processing would you apply? Back when I got it I just downloaded the photos to my computer and that was that!
You can either shoot in jpeg or in RAW.
RAW files are like a digital negative that require you process them on your computer for them to look the best.
RAW files contain more information and give you more flexibility in editing, but if you just want the image, shooting in jpeg is the simplest most straight forward approach.
Usually just a few simple tweaks to light levels, colours, contrast, crop etc. There'll always be something you can do in post to make a photo look better, but modern smartphones do most of this stuff automatically. Back in the days when I could be bothered lugging around the 'big' camera, the thing to use was Adobe Lightroom. I used Photoshop because I didnt want to spend for a second Adobe product. Today I'd use a free alternative called Photopea . I found this link with a roundup of some popular easier options https://zapier.com/blog/best-ai-photo-editor/
Think about what you’ll be doing.
Unless you’ve got a really fast lens for the DSLR, the phone camera is going to be better in low light.
If you’re outside, especially big open areas, nature, anywhere you might want to zoom, you’ve probably got a better telephoto lens for the DSLR.
The DSLR will likely make you stand out as a tourist.
The phone is more convenient and more pixels but more pixels isn’t always going to be better. Lenses are usually more important than the sensor.
It’s really personal about your comfort level and the types of photography you’re looking to do.
Just remember to enjoy the experience over having a photo of ever moment/thing.
Maybe I'm just old school, but actual proper physical glass lenses with optical zoom will always perform better than tiny lenses that fake just about everything digitally.
Eh old sensors perform pretty poorly. You end up with noise that’s hard to remove. Old Canon sensors had this terrible banding. Ultimately the image you get is math, and there are multiple ways to get the same result.
I respectfully disagree. As long as you have control over your exposure triangle, you can have far more quality control than any phone sensor.