This is not aimed at those pho­tog­ra­phers try­ing to make a liv­ing at it. That would be a sep­a­rate page. This is intended for begin­ners and advanced ama­teurs look­ing to take home some great shots from that ‘Trip of a Life­time’.

The island of Puerto Rico cer­tainly qualifies.

A Vet­eran of Many Cam­era Battles

Since I’ve been doing pho­tog­ra­phy for 40 years, I’ve seen the cam­era mar­ket go through a lot of changes. I’ve always been a ‘cam­era geek’ and wanna-be cam­era collector.

My 1st cam­era was a Kodak Brownie, my 1st ‘real’ cam­era was an Olym­pus Pen FT (1/2-frame 35mm porro-prism) with 3 lenses.

That was fol­lowed by a Nikon F2 with 3 lenses, then I jumped into the Olym­pus OM sys­tem in a big way– 4 bod­ies and 13 lenses.  Medium for­mat was next– a Mamiya RB67 with 2 lenses, and then sev­eral 4x5 view cam­eras.  I shot a mix of Color and B&W film back then.

I still shoot a lit­tle 120 film…  I own a Fuji GSW 690 III, medium for­mat rangefinder with wide angle lens for night-time shots.

The Birth of Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy.. I was there

My first ‘hands-on’ expe­ri­ence with dig­i­tal imag­ing was with an Apple Quick­Take 150 I bor­rowed and quickly gave back.  It was a joke.  As was the first Sony Mav­ica I tried.  It was sim­ply a ‘hi-def’ video cam­era that only shot stills and cost a grand, though it had these cute lit­tle pro­pri­etary floppy disks.

Those were the early days of Dig­i­tal Photography.

I paid $700 for my first ‘real’ dig­i­tal cam­era.. a Nikon Coolpix 990 at 3MP.  I loved it.. took tons of pho­tos with it before mov­ing to an Olym­pus C8080 at 8MP. Now I’m look­ing to replace my aging Sony Alpha A100 D/SLR.

The above was not an exer­cise in name drop­ping.  I sim­ply wanted you to know, I know what I’m talk­ing about when it comes to photo gear. The opin­ions are my own based years of expe­ri­ence and study.  I love cam­eras.. all my friends would tell you so.  I’m asked my opin­ion on photo gear, all the time.

The Smart­Phone Surge–

Today, lots of folks tend to rely on their cell phones for photos.

That’s fine for shots of the kids mess­ing around, the dog trash­ing your favorite hat or that impromptu video you just posted to Face­book. But seri­ously, the cur­rent crop of small ‘Point ‘n Shoot’ cam­eras can do great things. No, they will not turn you into an Ansel Adams, Richard Ave­don or Diane Arbus overnight, but they can put you on your way!

If your only choice is your cell phone, then please do your­self a favor and clear off as much inter­nal mem­ory as you can.

You can restore the 22GBs of music or your col­lec­tion of goofy Youtube vids when you get back home.  When trav­el­ing with your iPhone or Droid, it may not be pos­si­ble or may be too slow to upload your images to ‘the Cloud’.  Many Inter­net Cafes out­side the US main­land only sup­port ‘dial-up’ speeds.  Remem­ber Dial-Up?

If your phone uses remov­able mem­ory cards, score a cou­ple extra before you leave on vacation.

The National Geo­graphic has a nice ‘iPhone Photo Tips Gallery’ by Cot­ton Coul­son with exam­ples of what can be done via a cell phone.  While there, if you sign-up for NatGeo’s Photo of the Month Newslet­ter, you get a free e-booklet ‘Ulti­mate Field Guide to Pho­tog­ra­phy’.  (Fol­low the link in the side­bar when you get there)

Did you know you can be hit with
’roam­ing fees’ for sim­ply turn­ing on your phone.. even if you never make or take a call or send a text mes­sage?
Best to leave it off unless you know
what to expect.

If on the other-hand, you like shoot­ing with your iPhone 4Gs  (it is capa­ble of pro­duc­ing some pretty good images), then there are a few cool apps and attach­ments you can score to extend its capa­bil­ity.  There are a bunch of great photo apps for the iPad tablet too, but I digress.

Point ‘n Shoot Digi­cams (P&S)-

A good ‘P&S’ will make the trip a lot more fun and less stressful.

Many new digi­cams fea­ture wide-angle to tele­photo zoom lenses. This is great when try­ing to cap­ture that vivid vista or inte­rior shot.

Some will zoom out to decent tele­photo as well. Teles will get you that dis­tant shot of a surfer or col­or­ful bloom.

A word of warn­ing about long tele­photo lenses (10x or longer)

A steady hand is a must, oth­er­wise it will all be a per­fectly exposed blur. ‘Image Sta­bi­liza­tion’ has become quite com­mon, but those that fea­ture Lens or Image Sen­sor sta­bi­liza­tion are much bet­ter than those that do it ‘electronically’.

Elec­tronic or Dig­i­tal Image Sta­bi­liza­tion sac­ri­fices detail to min­i­mize blur via soft­ware manip­u­la­tion of the image, after the fact.  Not a good thing.  A lit­tle prac­tice at hold­ing the cam­era steady, will go a long ways.

I typ­i­cally shoot from a mono­pod, but that’s overkill if the light is bright and crisp.

As with all things, you don’t get what you don’t pay for.

The bet­ter ‘P&S’ cam­eras start at about $200US and run to about $300, with the very best over $400. There are lots of ‘cheap’, off brand dig­i­tal cam­eras out there..

you did fill out the war­ranty card and send it in, right?

If you only use your cam­era for Face­book or mak­ing a bunch of ‘machine prints’ to give away, then 8MP to 10MP is plenty. If you you make your own prints at home, then con­sider a cam­era with a 12MP to 16MP sen­sor. This will leave you some room for ‘crop­ping the image’ later on.

YouTube Vids and Stuff–

All of the new ‘P&S’ digi­cams will shoot some fla­vor of video, but that will eat up your mem­ory card and bat­tery very fast.

Either way, a cou­ple of extra mem­ory cards is a real good idea.

If you do plan to shoot video, those cards need to be rated for fast read/write. Oth­er­wise you will end up with ‘jaggy’ or bro­ken video.  Fast cards are not cheap.  Look for cards rated Class 10.

I carry a VadoHD vid­cam (720p) to shoot sim­ple YouTube stuff and save my D/SLR for stills.

It only weighs a few ounces and is quite small. It has 8GBs of inter­nal stor­age, but that’s it. Once I fill it up, I’m done until I can get back to my com­puter. That works out to 2 or 4 hours of video (depend­ing on qual­ity set­tings) so it’s not that bad.  The bat­tery is only good for about an hour and a half until it needs a charge.

Though the VadoHD has been updated a few times since I got mine 2 years ago, you can buy the ‘orig­i­nal ver­sion’ at steeply dis­counted prices.

Most of my YouTube vids were shot with the VadoHD.  See Menu Bar above.

Water­proof Point ‘n Shoots are a rel­a­tively new category–

They are very pop­u­lar for travel for good rea­son. They stand up to abuse and extreme con­di­tions where most would not. 2 years ago when I was plan­ning my first trip to PR, I didn’t like any of them so I scored an under­wa­ter hous­ing for my Canon S-80 instead. Now there are sev­eral wor­thy con­tenders. Most of these will do video as well.

If you plan to dive or snorkel or tend to trash your gear, you should seri­ously con­sider one of these more rugged models.

Advanced Ama­teur or Aspir­ing Pro?

My first rule– K.I.S.S.- Keep It Sim­ple Silly.

Why? Noth­ing is more frus­trat­ing or ‘Not Fun’ than wrestling with new gear and try­ing to make things work. It messes with the ‘free flow of cre­ative thought’. Only bring what you have used before, only bring what you will actu­ally use. Drag­ging around a bunch of extra stuff is bad for your back.

On my first trip to Hawaii (before dig­i­tal), I took a full set of 35MM gear AND a set of Mamiya RB67 medium for­mat gear with heavy tri­pod. I packed more photo gear than clothes. In 9 days, I shot over 80 rolls of 35mm Kodachrome, but only 4 rolls of 120 medium for­mat. After that trip, the RB67 stayed home.

Trav­el­ing light is less stressful.

Before a big trip, I study the des­ti­na­tion and have some idea of what to expect. Then I spread out my gear on the bed and load what I can into ONE bag… the one I’ll carry all the time, every­where. What’s the point of bring­ing a cam­era and a few lenses, if they stay in the hotel?

Today, a good 16MP P&S would cover 90% of my shoot­ing needs.

Dig­i­tal SLR Thoughts–

As much as a full fea­tured, inter­change­able lens cam­era may appeal to your ambi­tion to shoot bet­ter images, a top of the line Point ‘n Shoot might serve you bet­ter. Yes, they cost as much as a cheap, dis­counted Dig­i­tal SLR, but will that D/SLR deliver bet­ter results? Prob­a­bly not and here’s why– The ‘kit’ lens bun­dled with the cheap D/SLR is a com­pro­mise in per­for­mance because it had to meet seri­ous bud­get con­straints. Do you really think a $99 dol­lar kit lens is going to deliver the goods?  On the other hand, the lens on a high-end ‘P&S’ was opti­cally opti­mized for that smaller sensor.

My old Olym­pus C-8080 (8MP) could out-perform D/SLR kit lenses of the period because of its supe­rior lens design.

I promptly replaced the ‘kit’ lens of my A100 with some­thing
bet­ter. A Sigma 24mm– 60mm F2.8 macro (now discontinued).

The Mega-Zoom Point & Shoots–

There is yet another sub-category of P&S that caters to those who only want to carry one cam­era, no mat­ter what, but want it all.  These cam­eras resem­ble D/SLRs in look and feel. They do not have inter­change­able lenses.

They also sport very long zoom lenses.  Some over 600mm.

I will not go into the con­cepts of opti­cal lens design here, but lenses of more than a 1 to 10 zoom ratio (1:10) are full of design com­pro­mise and trade offs.  The first thing to go is the F stop or how much light the lens can draw.  This inversely effects Auto Focus as the less light there is, the harder it is for the cam­era to set focus.  There are other opti­cal issues too and the com­puter in the cam­era will try to com­pen­sate for most of it.  Try­ing to hand-hold a lens longer than 400mm can be very frus­trat­ing. A per­fectly exposed blur is not the goal.

The lat­est mod­els are not bad, but under­stand, a lot of com­pro­mise went into cre­at­ing that ridicu­lously long zoom lens.

The dig­i­tal cam­era of today, is a highly evolved product.

So the real ques­tion should be– Will I ever upgrade the cheap D/SLR ‘kit’ lens and will I ever add other lenses to the mix? If the answer is prob­a­bly not or no, why has­sle with a D/SLR in the first place? There are bet­ter choices.

The Die Hards–

OK… this is what I use for the Scurvy Dog’s Blog and how I use it

My stan­dard ‘travel kit’ includes an aging Sony A100 (digital/SLR) with the Sigma lens detailed above, an extreme wide-angle Sigma 10mm –20mm zoom and a Konica/Minolta 70mm to 210mm F4.0 medium tele­photo zoom. These 3 lenses plus a good 2x tele-converter is it. This may not be con­sid­ered PRO grade stuff, but it gets the job done.

Most of my pho­tos are shot with the extreme wide-angle zoom.  It has to be stopped down one and a half stops to get good results.

Some­times I bring along a sep­a­rate flash that can be used off cam­era with­out a TTL cable.

All of this fits in a left-handed sling bag I scored sev­eral years ago. It’s not pretty, but func­tional. I can and have car­ried this all day.

A mono­pod is usu­ally clipped to the top of my bag. A com­pact Alu­minum tri­pod is never far off.

98% of the images on this site were shot with the A100.

I do have to ‘Pho­to­shop the heck’ out of most of the images to make them work.  Espe­cially the high ISO, low light stuff.  The A100 trashes the shad­ows quite badly.  ISO 800 is mar­ginal, ISO 1,600 is junk.  To be fair, this was Sony’s first Dig­i­tal SLR after tak­ing over Konica/Minolta.  Sony has truly evolved since then.  The A900 and the sub­se­quent NEX-7 are great!

I should note that I will be upgrad­ing my gear soon and will prob­a­bly switch to one of the Mir­ror­less cam­era sys­tems..
I like to travel light.  More on this once I make the switch.

Lens hoods, espe­cially those ‘funny look­ing flower petal’ shaped ones are an absolute must.  Zoom lenses, espe­cially the ones that cover a long zoom range (1 to 5 zoom ratio, or more) are made up of many indi­vid­ual lens ele­ments.  Though lens mak­ers have gone to extremes to con­trol inter­nal reflec­tions, a sim­ple hood will keep lens flare to a min­i­mum.  Use’em if you got’em.  Polar­iz­ing fil­ters on bright sunny days are a good idea too.

I also carry a cross-star fil­ter for spe­cial effect and a neu­tral den­sity (ND) fil­ter to reduce expo­sure when it’s too bright.  A polar­izer can be sub­sti­tuted for an ND fil­ter if you’re on a budget.

I have many other fil­ters too, but some of these effects can be repli­cated in Gimp,  Adobe Photoshop/Elements or Pixlema­tor for Mac OSX.

When I do score a new (or lightly used) lens, I always get a mult-coated UV (ultra­vi­o­let)  fil­ter for it.  This reduces haze which affects per­ceived sharp­ness.  It also elim­i­nates the need to clean the front element.

A friend of mine had her Sony A900 with $1,800 Zeiss zoom tip over on a tri­pod.. the fil­ter was smashed, but the lens survived.

My gear is con­stantly exposed to the ele­ments and I’m too clumsy not to use a ‘pro­tec­tive’ fil­ter. Resist the urge to buy cheap fil­ters. There is much debate by Pros over the sub­ject of using a pro­tec­tive fil­ter or not.

It’s impor­tant to know your limits.

The only thing I
want to add to my set is a true macro. (1:1 magnification)

The oppor­tu­ni­ties for close-up images here in Puerto Rico are fantastic.

Some­thing between 90mm to 105mm because most crit­ters will run off before you get very close.

I will prob­a­bly drop the 2x tele-converter from my bag, once I score a macro.

Back when I was car­ry­ing an Olym­pus OM-4, 4 lenses, fil­ters and film, it would all fit in a mil­i­tary sur­plus gas mask bag (dyed black). Each lens came with sturdy leather case and metal lens hood too.  It went every­where I did.

All of the pop­u­lar name brand cam­era mak­ers sell top-notch Dig­i­tal SLRs, but do not over­look Pana­sonic, Sam­sung or Sony either. They may be new to the game, but they ‘Got Game’. Sony acquired Konica/Minolta a while back and they are deter­mined to become a major player.

Dig­i­tal Cam­era Tech­nol­ogy Evolves…

A new breed of com­pact ‘prism-free’ or ‘mir­ror­less’ inter­change­able lens digi­cams from Olym­pus, Pana­sonic, Sam­sung and Sony show a lot of promise, but that’s a whole story in its own right.  Even Nikon has tossed its hat into the mix. I’ll be tak­ing a closer look at these cam­eras in the near future.  Espe­cially the recently released NEX-7 from Sony.

If you like delv­ing into reviews or track­ing what’s new in the way of photo gear, do your­self a favor and check out my most favorite photo site of all time– Dig­i­tal Photo Review.  You can eas­ily get lost in the place.

A Word About Pho­tograph­ing Peo­ple– 

I am NOT a lawyer, but these things are a given: Shoot­ing peo­ple in pub­lic is usu­ally con­sid­ered ‘fair game’ as long as the images are NOT used for com­mer­cial pur­poses. Blog­ging Sites and Youtube are full of stu­pid stuff, peo­ple did in pub­lic.
I have no clue what is legal in other coun­tries, but Puerto Rico IS a ter­ri­tory of the USA.

Blog­gers are pro­tected by the same 1st Amend­ment rights as journalists.

In the pri­vacy of someone’s home
you may need per­mis­sion
to pho­to­graph them.

I carry a short Model Release in Eng­lish and Span­ish, but I hardly ever need them.

I have ‘em if I do.

If you are in doubt about what’s legal, don’t do it.

Though Fed­eral law trumps local Span­ish law, Span­ish law is not the same as State law (as it per­tains to Puerto Rico).

Do you speak Spanish?

Notes Regard­ing Recommendations:

Most of my rec­om­men­da­tion links will take you to B & H Photo Video in New York City.  There is also a ‘short­list’ of B&H links in the Side­bar.  I’ve been order­ing from B&H since the 1980’s.  They are very trust­wor­thy and work to resolve any issues.  They will ship USPS where most will not.  On top of that, their prices are very com­pet­i­tive.  You might find it a lit­tle cheaper else­where, but is it worth the risk?  A few links will take you to Ama­zon for things B&H does not sell like the VadoHD.

Links to hard­ware will be updated as gear evolves and new prod­ucts become available.

Com­mis­sions paid are very small and do not add a sin­gle dime to your order.  The price would be the same regard­less of how you got there.  Though this site is a ‘labor of love’ it is very time con­sum­ing.  I would spend more time on it, if I could make a few bucks in the process.

My rec­om­men­da­tions were made after many, many hours of research­ing other sites and study­ing lots of user testimonials.

It should go with­out say­ing, I did not get to test every­thing I fea­tured here.  I’m not so rich I can do that.  These are my per­sonal picks and may not suit your own needs.

In the end, you must decide what is right for you. Right?

So please think of me, the next time you con­sider buy­ing a camera.

Thanx, Roberto.

 

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