Help to pick a camera for wildlife photography.

[stevo]

One thing though to remember is whilst you`d get a cropped picture due to sensor size with say a 400D the sweet spot is usually in the centre of the frame whereas on a full frame sensor image quality tails off towards the edges.


Steve.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by tessnell

What is more, everyone here is ignoring the effect of pixels. If you want to print a photograph you will probably choose 240 pixels per inch (not dpi as is often wrongly quoted) to give a high resolution image.

i'm sorry but this is incorrect - pixels per inch are relevant to display on pixelated devices such as monitors - Dpi that is dots per inch relates to the number of dots of ink per inch delivered by the print head of a printer - therefore if you wanted to print a high quality photo you would select 300Dpi to give a high resolution image

Originally Posted by tesnell

If you have a full frame digital camera (eg Canon 1DsMkII) you have many more pixels to play with and can crop away and end up with a larger image than with a typical DSLR, and being larger (on the camera) the pixels will also give higher quality images with less noise.

again this is partially correct - it actually depends on the pixel density of the sensor, although it is true that cropping a 1DSmk2 will give you more resolution than the coresponding view from say the 20D, however if you try this with the 5D which is also full frame you will wind up with a 5MP image as oposed to the 8MP you would have got from the 20D or the 10 from the 400D.

most pros (Rouse,Benvie, Macintryre etc) in fact choose to use field craft to get closer to their subject thus getting full frame images which dont need to be cropped , and feild craft is available to anyone with the paitence to learn it - which assuredly isnt true of the over £3K !DSmk2

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by Paul mabbott

I knew you'd see reason one day
Of course, for really good definition you could go back to large plate cameras .... - are these available at all? For anyone who wanted to try out one of the original cameras or whatever? Purely for curiosity, I don't have one ... even from my early years ....

you can get 5x4 inch and 8x10 inch large format cameras - the former is used extensively by landscape photographers such as joe cornish - the latter is rarely used due to price and bulk but is occasionally of use if the print is to be printed huge

both these shoot onto single sheets of film manually loaded into the camera back - i suppose you could retrofit one with a true lithograph plate if you had nothing better to do with your time , but i doubte it is a common practice

[tessnell]

[quote=eeyore;125478]i'm sorry but this is incorrect - pixels per inch are relevant to display on pixelated devices such as monitors - Dpi that is dots per inch relates to the number of dots of ink per inch delivered by the print head of a printer - therefore if you wanted to print a high quality photo you would select 300Dpi to give a high resolution image


Sorry eeyore, but I am correct and, with respect, you do not understand howinkjet printers deliver ink. If you select 240 pixels per inch (eg in Photoshop) for your image it means you are selecting 240 pixels worth of information from the camera image and placing that on one inch of paper when printing. Most high quality photo printers make up each pixel of image information with many dots of ink, the number depending on the printer resolution (usually greater than 2000 dots per inch).If your printer only delivered 300dpi, the image would look very blocky and even the lowest quality printers deliver many more dots per inch than 300.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by tessnell

Sorry eeyore, but I am correct and, with respect, you do not understand howinkjet printers deliver ink. If you select 240 pixels per inch (eg in Photoshop) for your image it means you are selecting 240 pixels worth of information from the camera image and placing that on one inch of paper when printing. Most high quality photo printers make up each pixel of image information with many dots of ink, the number depending on the printer resolution (usually greater than 2000 dots per inch).If your printer only delivered 300dpi, the image would look very blocky and even the lowest quality printers deliver many more dots per inch than 300.

again you are partially correct but not completely - you are correct about prinnter resolution , my a3 printer delivers somewhere in the region of 4800dpi I am aware of this and understand fully how it works , i just failed to explain it particularly well - too much magners

and in fact you are technically correct about the dpi/ppi , but such pedantry doesnt help the inexperienced user as nearly every software package users the term dpi in relation to printing and thus searching their menus for ppi will be unhelpfully fruitless

by way of illustration looking at the software i have loaded on my pc

Adobe Photoshop - resolution in Dpi
Adobe photoshop elements - resolution in Dpi
Adobe indesign - resolution in Dpi
Serif page plus - resolution in Dpi

adoble premier elements - resolution in ppi
serif webplus - resolution in ppi

the first four are concerned with print and thus select resolution dpi , the latter two are concerned only with onscreen display and thus use pixels per inch

[tessnell]

[quote=eeyore;125783]
and in fact you are technically correct about the dpi/ppi , but such pedantry doesnt help the inexperienced user as nearly every software package users the term dpi in relation to printing and thus searching their menus for ppi will be unhelpfully fruitless

by way of illustration looking at the software i have loaded on my pc
Adobe Photoshop - resolution in Dpi
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Funny but my Adobe Photoshop uses ppi in the Image menu
I gather from other posts in this forum that the term 'pedant' is a put down. Not sure why you would want to do that.

If you want to print a high resolution, high quality image , say to A3 size, it is impossible to do this properly without understanding ppi. After all the size of image you produce depends totally on (a) the number of pixels produced by the camera and (b) the pixels per inch you select for your print (using eg the Image menu in Photoshop).

I accept that not everyone wants to produce professional quality images, nor apply for distinctions from the Royal Photographic Society, but if someone wants to learn to be a better photographer then getting it right is not pedantic, it is essential.