Best High Quality Camera for taking pictures for my xenforo forum

[Marcus]

I want to publish some photos to my community and I am thinking about the right camera for that. What's the easiest / best solution for taking high quality pictures and upload them to xenforo.

I guess iphone 5(s) pictures can be distinguished from pictures taken from a Canon EOS 5D Mark II? Is that true even for 300x300 pictures? I only need the camera for web publishing, what's your suggestion?

I prefer pictures where something is focussed perfectly clear visible, where other areas in the picture are a bit blurry. Like in the cinema.

 

[turtile]

The blurry background has more to do with the lens and technique than the camera. A full frame camera will provide shallower DOF (more background blur). So a 5D or Nikon D600 will help with that along with longer lenses and larger apertures (85mm F1.8 is affordable). In my opinion, Carl Zeiss lenses have great bokeh (background blur) but they are manual focus only and expensive.

If you want the cheapest solution, purchase the cheapest used DSLR body you can find and add a cheap lens with a large aperture (Nikon 35mm F1.8 DX). You could pair those two up for around $400 used.

 

[AndyB]

I want to publish some photos to my community and I am thinking about the right camera for that. What's the easiest / best solution for taking high quality pictures and upload them to xenforo.

You will want to describe in greater detail the type of pictures you want to post to your forum.

 

[MagnusB]

I would say that investing in that camera just for a few pictures is kind of an overkill. Depending on how many you need, it would probably be cheaper to pay someone to take them for you. Or you can look at the Canon Powershot series, I have one of those, which does take decent pictures.

 

[Marcus]

The idea is just to put some photos inside my community. I do have some ideas for some image libraries where users share images relating to the topic of my community. I want to start some images on my own. I have no idea what kind of images it will be.

I participated in a microfilm where they were shooting with just a 5D and the quality was amazing. The production team was using lots of lighting stuff and put a lot of things on the camery itself, but I didn't know you can shoot a commercial on a rather modest 5D.

Maybe I will shoot some small videos, too. The idea is to have good quality with an easy connection to my computer / or directly uploading the images to my forum with iOS. The cheapest solution I found was a "large aperture" iOS app

 

[Marcus]

The problem is when I have such a good camera but don't know how to handle it, it's kind of useless. I guess I have to take a camera course before using such a good tool. Otherwise a cheap phone camera would do the same results :/

 

[AndyB]

I guess iphone 5(s) pictures can be distinguished from pictures taken from a Canon EOS 5D Mark II? Is that true even for 300x300 pictures? I only need the camera for web publishing, what's your suggestion?

For a small 300x300 image you can use your iPhone 5 and it would make very little difference.

 

[EQnoble]

If you are going to use an iphone for your pics just make sure there is really good light...I find that images coming from the iphone camera look ultra grainy when not taken under really good lighting.

 

[SilverCircle]

If you are going to use an iphone for your pics just make sure there is really good light...I find that images coming from the iphone camera look ultra grainy when not taken under really good lighting.

That's a generic problem and a result of using small ccd sensors. While there are ways to compensate the noise problem with software, there is absolutely no way to cheat physics and thus no way of getting the same quality one normally gets from the much larger sensor fitted in a typical DSLR.

As long as there is enough light, the problem doesn't show its ugly face, but under poor lighting conditions, most smartphones (and most compact cameras as well) produce more or less useless results. Maybe good enough for the average snapshot, but that's about it.

 

[EQnoble]

That's a generic problem and a result of using small ccd sensors. While there are ways to compensate the noise problem with software, there is absolutely no way to cheat physics and thus no way of getting the same quality one normally gets from the much larger sensor fitted in a typical DSLR.

As long as there is enough light, the problem doesn't show its ugly face, but under poor lighting conditions, most smartphones (and most compact cameras as well) produce more or less useless results. Maybe good enough for the average snapshot, but that's about it.

True enough, I just said iphone because that's what was mentioned and I have one. And yeah, basically there really isn't a way to compare apples and digital cameras.

It is really odd though...I can snap two images one after the other of lets say my backyard without moving with my hand resting on the hood of my car and i get two images of drastically different quality. It's not that I expect my phone to take amazing photos, I am wondering why given the circumstances I cannot reproduce the output.

Whatever...I just use my smartphone's camera for spur of the moment / convenience shots and don't really expect it to replace what I am content to call a real camera.

 

[craigiri]

To answer your question, at 300 to 500 pixels wide there should be little difference between pics from your smartphone and other cams....in fact, the iphone 5 is pretty dang good. The only think you may miss is not having a zoom and a good flash. If you were going to buy a consumer cam, you could get something decent for $80 - $250......
Here are some pics from a 4S downsized.

 

[Anpanman]

You might want to take a look at the Panasonic DMC-LX7. Seems like a compact point-and-shoot type camera but has manual controls like a dSLR. Relatively easy to use/learn and also shoots excellent video.