Which Camera Brand Should I Choose?

If you are interested in nature photography as I am, your choice of camera will most likely be a DSLR if you want to produce high quality images. Of course, a bridge camera like those made by Lumix, Canon and Nikon can satisfy the needs of those who are not very picky about the level of detail found in their photos as mentioned in my last post. But in most cases, if you really want to capture fine detail that draws the eye of the viewer into the shot, a DSLR will be the way to go in my opinion because the lenses and sensors that can capture that kind of detail are found mainly in conjunction with DSLRs.

So which camera brand is best? Well, that is a little like asking who makes the best car, computer or furniture. There are several brands of camera makers that are just fine, and a lot depends on what you intend to do with your camera, what kind of photography you are most likely to pursue, as well as your overall budget.

If you are a nature photographer though, you will want to have a wide range of lenses to choose from including everything from wide-angle to super-telephoto. This automatically restricts the choice of which brand to use since some camera brands do not sport a wide array of lenses. If you want to stick with new manufacturer lenses, the best populated lines of lenses in the DSLR world is made by either Canon or Nikon. Each brand is a fine choice and you can't go wrong going either way. There are tons of nature photographers who swear by their Canons just as there are many more that claim they will never give up their Nikons. Wading into the debate about which of these two behemoth brands is best is pointless to me. They are both great for nature photography. Just make your choice and don't look back.

However, if your photography gear budget is a modest one, let me make a suggestion that I think has worked well for me so far. The largest expense that a nature photographer will have in buying their photo equipment is in the lenses they choose. Why? The truth is that camera bodies are necessary, but nothing will impact the quality of a photo like the choice of lens that actually focuses the image on the sensor. The sharpness of the lens, the amount of light that it lets in, the avoidance of chromatic aberration and other lens issues, will have a dramatic influence over the image that you produce with your camera body. In fact, give me an ordinary camera body with a great lens any day over the most advanced camera body with a so-so lens.

So now that we realize that the lenses that we choose are going to make up the lion's share of the equipment budget, what now? Well, it is also important to recognize that wonderful lenses have been sold for many years that will still fit many of the newer camera bodies in use today. They may be used but as long as they have not been abused, there is nothing wrong with using a camera lens that has been around for many years. In fact, sometimes the older lenses can still not only hold their own with modern lenses, in many cases they can even surpass them in the images they produce.

One lens maker in particular stood out to me after I had done my research and that is Minolta. They were one of the major camera and lens manufacturers in the world just a couple of decades ago. They made some of the highest regarded lenses for the SLR and DSLR market before the company went out of business and was eventually sold to Sony. After buying the technology that Minolta possessed, Sony made the decision to keep the same lens mount used by Minolta on their last generation of lenses, the A (or Alpha) mount. This means that all of those vintage high quality lenses made by Minolta are still usable on Sony camera bodies that many are still using today.

What this means for a nature photographer today who has a limited budget but wants a full range of high quality gear in the field is that when you buy a Sony camera that features the A mount (this is important since Sony has recently added cameras that use an E mount design) you get the benefit of outfitting the camera body with a full array of wonderful lenses at incredibly low prices that will more than meet the needs found in nature and produce stunningly sharp and colorful images that the Minolta lenses were famous for. The photo at the top of this post is an example of an image made with a Sony A65 camera body and a Minolta 100-300mm APO lens.

Of course, you can also buy used Canon and Nikon lenses that will still fit on more modern camera bodies. But there is one major reason that I chose the Sony body/ Minolta lens combination and that has to do with image stabilization. But I'll save that for my next post.