Which camera should I get?

First off, I'd like you to take a look at the images in this article that my wife, Danielle, and I put together: 10 Things To Know About Chris Isaak. Which of these photos was taken with $2000 camera and lens, and which were taken with a $200 camera? Can you tell?

So, which should you use? I get this question a lot from people who see me at concerts with 15 pounds of gear slung around my shoulders. The other most common discussion I have with people at concerts is that they discount the camera they have as incapable of doing what mine do. While I can't go into specific recommendations for everyone because everyone's needs and preferences are different, I'll address the choice between SLR (or "professional") cameras and what are called "compact" or "point-and-shoot" cameras.

1."The best camera is the one you have with you."

Not many people would put up with lugging around a metal bodied SLR with a equally heavy metal encased telephoto lens everywhere you go. So even if you had one laying around at your disposal, how often would you be lugging that to your friends house party or the family outing to the beach? Not likely. So a camera that sits on the shelf because it's too awkward to drag along doesn't take any photos. On the other hand most people have SOME camera on their person at all times. It's your cell phone.
In daylight or well lit interiors, even many cell phone cameras are very capable of capturing printable images. Remember the passenger jet that was forced to land in the Hudson River? Did you see the image of that plane in the water with all the passengers standing on the wings waiting to be rescued? That image was printed on the front page of newspapers all over the country. That image was taken on an iPhone.

2."Compact cameras are getting more and more capable."

In the last couple of years compact cameras have made leaps forward in terms of quality and capability. Early digital compact cameras weren't very good at even the simplest photographic tasks and didn't allow you any kind of control over how it captured those images. Today's compact cameras have features like panoramic stitching, wireless file transfer, and high definition video that aren't even possible with many if not all of the most expensive professional SLR cameras.

3. "Compact cameras produce images every bit as good as professional cameras for 90% of what you take photos of."

When I tell people this I don't think they really believe it, but consider this:
a. Most photos you take are of people.
b. Most of the photos of those people are taken at a range of 6-10 feet from you.
c. Most of those people are lit pretty well(either by the sun or inside a house where you want a decent amount of light to see by).
d. Do you want to worry about exposure, flash compensation, your focusing mode, your ISO sensitivity, depth of field, etc. when you grab a camera to take a quick grab shot of a friend doing something goofy? Didn't think so.
e. All of your photos will either end up on the internet or in a print that's no bigger than 4"X6". Don't fall for the megapixel numbers game. Why do you need a photo that's 4000 pixels wide if you're going to put all your images on the internet 500 pixels wide at most? It just fills up your hard drive and makes everything you do with your images on your computer slower.

So what do you need a big expensive professional camera for? Aside from just wanting to look like a professional (if that's your goal I think you have other issues), there are a few things you need a more capable, usually more expensive camera and lenses for.
a. More control. Don't like how the camera decided to expose a scene? The higher up the scale you go generally the more control you get over how the camera captures the image. Along with that comes more complexity though and it forces you to know more and more about how the camera actually works and what every button and wheel does. And with professional cameras, there are a lot more of those buttons and wheels.
b. Better images in tough exposure situations. What would that be? High contrast scenes, like a performer lit by a bright spotlight on a otherwise dark stage for example, fool a lot of compact cameras into making incorrect exposures because they're designed to try to make everything in the scene the same brightness. If you have a camera where you can override the automatic settings, you can tell the camera to only expose for certain parts of the frame or what exactly the exposure should be. Again, it takes a lot more understanding of how the camera works to make it work though.
c. Tough focusing situations. If you have two people in a scene at different distances from the camera and you only want to the focus to be sharp on one of them, a compact camera might decide that you want to focus on the other person, or on both equally. If you can't adjust that, well you're out of luck.
d. Artificial lighting, i.e.: flashes and studio lighting. If you need to light a large room (bigger than your living room) or light something farther away than 15-20 feet to photograph it, you may need a more powerful flash than the one that pops up on your camera. Most compact cameras don't have a mount for a external flash (called a "hot shoe") or the capability of triggering other flashes wirelessly. That's the kind of capability you get with professional SLR cameras. Likewise if you want to use the big studio strobes you see in professional photographers studios. Do you need that?
e. Low light situations. Badly lit areas where you don't want to (or can't) use a flash. SLR cameras with their larger image sensors excel at this. Their greater light gathering capability allows them to use higher shutter speeds that freeze the action and avoid the blurry images that most compact cameras will give you in dimly lit scenes.

And that's it. It sounds like a big list but it's not situations that most people find themselves in too often. Even in those instances, it's a trade off between convenience and control. Between how much time you want to spend learning about your camera and how much time you want to spend taking photos. My ultimate suggestion to anyone looking to move up to a more expensive camera is to look at the list above and ask yourself how often you run into those scenarios I've described and if having more control is worth the complication and extra heft. Then realize that your money would probably be better spent learning how to better use the camera you have first. People who buy expensive cameras and always leave them on automatic settings because they don't know how they work really wasted a lot of money.

So which photos in the example at the beginning were from which camera? Everything taken from the left and center was from my $2000 SLR camera/lens. Everything taken from the right and the photo of Chris with the ladies all around him was from our $200 Sony compact camera.