> Take tons of photos, they change a lot very quickly.
Speaking of photos, make sure you have an SLR/interchangeable lens camera with a good fixed ("prime") portrait lens.
The image quality of large sensor cameras is way ahead of compact cameras (not to mention camera phones). Given that young babies spend most of their time indoors, you need a fast lens to use natural light and avoid using the flash.
A little digital compact is not able to shoot at ISO 3200 with low noise, so you'll end up using flash for indoor shooting which ruins the mood. It will not be able to shoot at 5 FPS, which is the only way (in my experience) to consistently get candid shots with magical looks on people's faces instead of closed eyes or momentary grimaces. And it won't be able to shoot with a narrow depth of field, which makes portraits way more beautiful.
If you take a nice DSLR, put it on aperture-priority with the lens all the way open at high ISO, turn the flash off, and shoot at 5 FPS while interesting things are happening to people (preferably from a bit of a distance so things are more candid), you'll get shots that people beg you for copies of. When I do this at weddings, I've have two different couples (friends/family) tell me that they liked my pictures better than the pro who they hired, and I'm not really that talented.
It's not about fps, though the shutter was really fast since babies move a lot. That was hard to balance with the lighting because we couldn't fire strobes since it would freak them out.
Basically we were shooting a lot of captures really fast (but not quite burst shots) to get the perfect facial expression. Medium format camera digital back files are so huge that they can't cycle that fast. As it was, the photographer's team had to set up a system that got jpegs and RAWs at the same time: the jpegs were radioed into Capture One for immediate review, while the RAWs went to card and were imported afterwards. It was amazing to watch the team work. We had 30k captures after 5 days of shooting - it was a beast to edit down to 27 final shots.
> Lastly, from a technical perspective, sensors and lenses
> on cheaper cameras are pretty good these days, and
> generally when you shooting you don't want full manual.
True, but focus speed and low-light performance are still very lacking compared to SLRs. And I'd say these two are quite important for family stuff: just try to take photo of playing kids with camera which is slow to focus or has substantial shutter lag. Not all family dinners are brightly lit either.
Learning the very basics of photography: what shutter speed, ISO and aperture do, and how to adjust them for each situation.
It takes literally half an hour to learn this, and of course you won't be taking professional quality photos, but your photos will go from crappy to OK or even good, even if you only have a phone (as long as it has manual mode). You know that time you took a random photo and the light and colors came out better than normal? You can achieve that consistently.
After learning this, I felt dumb for not having spent that half an hour years before.
(One trick that I use for family photos is to use a delay of 1 second, to avoid the movement when I press the shutter. (It's not useful when there are kids. One second later they are in another room.))
Thanks...I honestly question how much reliable advice I could give, as I've arguably overspent, even as I'm not caught up in the arms race. Someone did point out that iOS has special apps that do allow shutter speed control, so I'll have to come up with a few other different usecases.
... for practice, learning, or stationary, long-lasting subjects.
Of course you want to get a good feel for the aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity so that when you see a beautiful bird about to take off for flight, or a butterfly touch down ever so momentarily, you aren't fumbling with settings, and you've already got a good sense of what settings will work.
Definitely agree though - many cameras have "priority" modes where you're really only changing the shutter speed or aperture, and it's still doing the rest automatically for you, so you can focus on whatever that one setting does, while also seeing what the smart camera tells you the other settings should be in those situations.
> Using a flash properly can and does lead to a better photograph, but it takes a lot of practice.
I recognize that my P&S camera isn't fast enough to take pictures in low light without the flash, but are there other situations where I should be using a flash?
Generally, using a flash makes my pictures look "cheap" (better than blurry, I suppose). Even when there is strong backlighting and I need to use the flash to balance it out, it still looks wrong.
Much to my wife's consternation, I usually tend to push the no-flash as much as possible (I've missed quick-moving children and other shots because of this). I suppose if I used the flash I would have actually captured the moment, but I don't think I've really seen a picture I've taken with the flash that I've found to be remarkable looking.
Anyone who has little kids often needs to shoot erratically moving subjects in a dimly lit environment. Low light is where most progress in imaging is made, I’d say perhaps over the last 7 years, ever since outright resolution stopped mattering (the others are dynamic range and focus performance). Everything that happened since like OIS, new generations of image sensors, computational photography etc came to serve longer shutter exposures to get more light into the sensor.
You have to juggle three parameters when taking photos: aperture (How much light does the lens let through?), shutter speed (How long will the lens be kept open?) and film speed (How sensitive is the film to light?).
Slow film speeds inevitably lead to larger apertures or slower shutter speeds or both. The brightness of lenses is limited which means that the shutter speed (which you can take up to years with pinhole cameras if you really want to) has to do all the heavy lifting and exposure times can quickly get out of hand.
A little example: Say you are shooting with ASA 25 film and your light-meter tells you that, given your aperture, you need a shutter speed of 15 seconds. (You would get values in this range at dusk or inside at night with a normal lightbulb illuminating the room.) To bring that down to a more manageable quarter second (you will still need a tripod but capturing smiles might be quite a bit easier) you would need crazy fast ASA 1600 film (only to give you a sense of perspective on that: you could buy the first ASA 1000 color film only in 1982).
This is actually one area where digital photography handily beats film. A fancy and expensive digital camera like the Nikon D3S will let you shoot photos up to ISO 102400 (for the purpose of this comment let ISO = ASA) which will bring your shutter speed down from a quarter second to 1/256 of a second. Well, those ISO 102400 photos will look like crap, but you will get usable results up to ISO 12800 [+] (that would be 1/32 of a second, you could even pull that one off handheld if you really tried). Unthinkable with film. That’s the reason why digital point and shoots can get away with fairly insensitive minuscule sensors.
Long story short: You mom is absolutely correct when she says that shutter speeds were slow. The reason for that were slow films which cause slow shutter speeds (given a fixed aperture).
Speaking of photos, make sure you have an SLR/interchangeable lens camera with a good fixed ("prime") portrait lens.
The image quality of large sensor cameras is way ahead of compact cameras (not to mention camera phones). Given that young babies spend most of their time indoors, you need a fast lens to use natural light and avoid using the flash.
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