Megapixels vs. Megabucks

Yesterday I was sitting at the Coffee Tree in Squirrel Hill when a distinguished-looking gentleman came up to me and asked me for directions to downtown Pittsburgh. I told him the easiest was to get there and was about to say goodbye and go back to my reading when I noticed a Canon 1Ds with a 24-70 L lens on his shoulder. For those of you who are not photography geeks, such set up costs somewhere around $8500. I asked the guy if he was a photographer; to my surprise he told me that he was a tourist and that he bought this ridiculously expensive camera in hopes of producing better pictures. He complained to me that his camera was “a rip-off” because even though he spent so much money he does not see much improvement in his photographs.

This guy is just one of a multitude of amateur photographers who don’t seem to realize that ninety nine times out of a hundred a photograph will only be as good as a photographer. Yes, the equipment (especially lenses) plays a big role in the quality once you get to a certain level. On the other hand, I have been shooting photographs more or less continuously for close to 20 years and I have taken some great (good enough to be published) photos with my 20-year-old Soviet-made Zenit ET and I have taken some incredibly crappy pictures with a four-thousand-dollar Hasselblad.

Several years ago I went to school with a kid who was a big gadget geek and had a trust fund larger than the annual income of some small countries. One day he came to my house and showed me a bunch of pictures that looked like they were taken with a point-and-shoot camera. As it turned out, he just bought a two-thousand-dollar Nikon F5 and slapped a seventy-dollar zoom-lens on it. A great investment!

A lot of my friends are professional photographers and some of them are quite good. Pretty much all of them, especially if photography is their only source of income, will shoot with the cheapest equipment they can get away with. One of my friends, who is a pretty highly sought wedding photographer, still shoots with a 15-year-old Hasselblad and a pair of Nikon 8008 bodies. He thought I was completely crazy when three years ago I dumped $1500.00 on a Canon 20D!

Most people seem to be completely taken by the megapixel hype and will spend enormous amounts of money every time a manufacturer will come out with a new camera that has more megapixels. I am fairly certain that most consumers don’t even look at other qualities of the camera, such as noise control, image stabilization, or low-light performance. What people don’t realize is that a 6-megapixel Nikon D50 will outperform a 9-megapixel Fuji S9000 any day of the week in any lighting situation. Moreover, why do people need 9-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras? To print 4x6 prints? Another thing that people don’t seem to realize is that more megapixels mean larger file sizes, and larger file sizes mean higher storage requirements.

I have been shooting weddings for about 10 years; for the past 3 years I have been shooting digital. In those 1o years I had only two clients who requested enlargements larger than 11x14. You can easily print a clean 11x14 from a 6-megapixel file; with an 8-megapixel camera such as a Canon 20D you’ll have more than enough room for cropping. The only reason I spent money on a Canon 5D last year was because I had several high-paying commercial jobs that required larger prints.

I guess I am trying to make two points here. The first point is that consumers should educate themselves before going to a store. If you really want to learn photography and really care about image quality, get a DSLR, but don’t let the pixel count be your only criteria for your decision. Do not buy an expensive camera and put a cheap lens on it – you’d be better off with a less expensive camera body and a better lens. When traveling, don’t pack fifty pounds of camera gear – chances are you won’t lug all that stuff everywhere you go anyway, and even if you do you won’t enjoy your trip as much.

Before making a decision on which camera to buy, visit wonderful websites such as dpreview.com, photo.net, and photographyreview.com. Or just run a Google search on the camera model that you are interested in (for example, Canon 40D+reviews). Educate yourself, read reviews and make your decision based on facts and on your personal needs instead of the megapixel count or the balance of your bank account.

And another thing – don’t keep your camera in the camera bag; in fact, don’t bring a camera bag at all! You can catch that wonderful frame only if you have a camera in your hands.