This thread inspired me to blow money I don’t have on shit I don’t need - and I’m now the proud owner of a Panasonic Lumix G1. Really looking forward to doing some serious low-light and tight DoF portraiture. Any more tips, other than the excellent ones already in this thread?
If you don’t have a tripod, get one and also get a remote switch and take some long exposures at night or at dusk. Around water is awesome.
The G1 should be a lot of fun, but it doesn’t have the low light capabilities of the entry level Canon or Nikon models. Pushing past ISO 800 things get a bit noisy in low light but it’s still better than the P&S cameras.
Enjoy, have fun with your new toy.
If you want to get pictures like that and spend a little less money, it can be done. The lenses the guys in this thread are talking about can be worth several thousand dollars. The 24-70 Canon L lens (a great lens) is close to $1,000.
If you can’t afford to spend that kind of money, my recommendation is to get a consumer DSLR and a 50mm prime lens. I have a Canon T1i, and with the 50mm prime it can take amazing photos. The best thing is that the Canon 50mm f1.8 prime is a very inexpensive lens - around $150. It’s not a zoom, but it is a good focal length for portraits, and for a beginner, not having a zoom is sometimes a good thing, because it will force you to really think about your composition.
The f1.8 is fast enough that you can take good quality indoor pictures without a flash. That also keeps the cost down, because a decent flash setup for a DSLR camera can also cost a thousand bucks.
Now that Canon has released the T1i, you can get the previous model, the Rebel XSi for a very low price. I believe you can get the Rebel XSi with Canon’s 18-55 is zoom lens for around $600. Add in another $150 for the 50mm prime, and you’ve got a great start at a beginner’s camera setup that can approach the kinds of image quality you linked to. After that, if you find yourself getting more serious about photography, start spending money on lenses. Coming from the point and shoot world, it may seem strange to spend a couple of thousand dollars on lenses for a $500 camera, but digital cameras are constantly changing and you may want to upgrade camera bodies several times. But the lenses have a very long lifetime as long as you’re willing to stay with the same manufacturer for you camera body.
Here’s an example of a picture taken with my camera in the simplest way, to give you an example of the kind of results you can get right out of the box: Canon T1i with 50mm f.18 lens That’s a picture of my daughter I snapped with the new camera to try it out - no flash, no fancy settings, no special lighting. I just turned the camera on, switched it to ‘Creative Auto’ mode, set the depth of field to narrow, and snapped.
A couple more shots:
Another shot of Katie, indoors
Crowsnest Mountain. This was shot using the camera on ‘auto’, using the kit 55-250is zoom lens. Anyone could snap that shot and get the same result.
I’m not posting these as examples of great photography, but to show what these cameras can do in the hands of an amateur like me, who barely knows what he’s doing. 
The hard truth is that to take great photos requires skill, talent, and effort. I have a friend who has a similar setup to mine, and we’ve taken pictures at the same place at the same time, and his always look markedly better. I’m still learning the details, but slowly coming along.
Here’s a Photography site I like: The Photography Podcast. Audio podcasts discussing various topics in photography, like how to use a flash, how to buy a lens, etc. Plus lots of more advanced topics. There’s a forum supporting the podcast, where people post photos for critique and discuss photographic gear and techniques. I have no affiliation with it, but I like listening to podcasts on my commute and this is one of them.
Agree (although it’s more like $90 here). A perfect lens for indoor portraits sans flash. I’ve extolled its virtues in other camera threads. Here’s my posted-too-often baby portrait (a friends kid); I love the focus on the face with the sharp detail on the baby-clothes fabric, vs the softness of rest of the image. Great lens.
Also this. Photography is very Darwinian. There are not only people better than you, there are people a thousand times better than you, no matter how good you are.
I went on a recent photography trip to southern Utah. We hit all the big sites – Bryce, Zion, etc. There were five of us. Four of us would take 3-4 hundred photos a day. One of us, call him Fred, took maybe 50 per site; then he’d review those shots in-camera and delete maybe half of those; then he’d upload those to a laptop and delete half again. When we went shooting, the other four of us would set up tripods and clickity click as the light changed. Fred would stand there, perhaps read a book for a while, then take a picture. We’d get to another site with arches and huge hoodoos and so forth and start climbing around. Fred would hang out in the parking lot for a bit and maybe take a couple; walk around the perimeter of our shooting and take a couple more. Click. Click. At the end of the four day trip, Fred had 64 photos, total. And they were pretty much all worthy photos. Not better then the best of us other four, but at a total effort of much much less than our combined effort. Wow.
What’s tantalizing to me is that you can occasionally make a REALLY good photo partly by dumb luck. As squeegee points out, you can partly overcome your limitations by shooting a boatload of pictures and then selecting the really good ones from them.
Photography is like architecture in that both require some science and some art. People like Fred probably have a leg up on the artistic angle, knowing what elements will work together before picking up the camera.
jjimm, to minimize depth of field…
Telephoto focal lengths
Close focus (you might invest in some diopters like these: http://www.amazon.com/Hoya-55mm-Close-Up-Filter-Diopters/dp/B0000AI1GK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=photo&qid=1252926966&sr=1-2)
Large apertures.
I think you need to adapt this lens to your 4/3 camera to max out the shallow depth of field capabilities. At $7000+ it could be the perfect ending to a mad spending spree:
Balls. Serves me right for impulse purchasing…
Holy crap.
Looking over those photos, besides depth of field, that photographer has a very good composition style. One that comes from experience.
Also there are some that use color to good effect. The photo of the two women in the brightly colored Indian dresses standing the green field so they stand out is a good example of both of these as is the woman having her face washed. Including those bright green leaves across the top, out of focus due to the depth of field, makes that photo great.
The 4/3 system has its advantages and disadvantages like anything else (I have an Olympus). dpreview gave yours a “highly recommended.”
I like the fact that I was able to get an adapter and use my old Minolta lenses. If you’re willing to go manual focus and aperture priority or manual preset, there’s a lot of good old glass out there. If you want to shoot with the lens wide open, you can manually focus and shoot away. When I do macro work, it’s no big inconvenience at all to use old lenses.
I was especially pleased with this one, made with a Vivitar 80-200mm f/2.8~3.5
http://picasaweb.google.com/lobotomyboy63/Flowers05_31_09#5342172325300628290
Im surprised it took 49 posts before someone mentioned this, Id say is the prime skill of any photographer to learn and hone.
Declan
I guess you missed posts 14 and 15 then.
We must have a Chicagoist editor on the boards…they ran your photo today.
I think this is the term for what I came in to describe; forgive me, it’s been about 30 years since I was a serious photographer.
What we used to do when developing the pictures (in a darkroom, by hand) was to take a piece of cardboard with a hole in the center and then shoot the image onto the photo paper while moving the hole around. This left the center of the image much more exposed than the edges, creating great contrast and focussing the subject since it popped out more than the edges.
It looks a lot like what I see in many of the photos linked in the OP. I’m sure there’s a Photoshop function that does this, because there seems to be a Photoshop function that does damn near anything you could want or imagine.
Damn, that’s a nice shot!
Yeah, I just re-read those posts. In my defense I must have just glazed over them reading how lens, photoshop among other things will get the desired effect.
Declan
We take a lot of photos were I work. On my first day of work my boss told me, “Any idiot can focus a lens. But lighting… that’s where the art is.”
Giles - I didn’t notice your second shot until now. That really is a beautiful and quite unique shot. I’ve seen cloud shots of the city before, but the aerial perspective combined with the evening light and reflections of the Hancock and nearby buildings in the water really make it.
Thanks, pulykamell, it was just lucky, seeing that and having my camera bag at my feet as I flew into Chicago O’Hare.