What DSLR should I buy? Is there an effective way to choose between different available DSLRs? Which one is the best DSLR in market these days? these are very common questions that I often get from my friends and readers, I thought why not scripting it for all my dear ones- It’s a good idea I guess 
If you are in one of your initial phases of research and you still have doubts whether or not to upgrade your gears to DSLR then I would like to recommend you to read my post “Is it worth upgrading to DSLR?” Believe me you will not lose anything by reading it.
OK, now that you have made up your mind to buy a DSLR; let me take you through a range of steps that I usually recommend to make decision in choosing a good DSLR.
According to me a good DSLR is not the one which is expensive or has all the advanced features or has a live view or light weight but it is a camera that serves you with what you expect after paying thousands of dollars.
Just grab a pen and a paper and write down your own conclusions as against the 5 steps that I am presenting below:
1. What type of photography are you going to do?
2. Getting familiar with important features.
3. What’s your budget?
4. Compare and shortlist.
5. Step out to analyze.
Walla!! You are done. That sounds easy right??
Now let me dig into each of the steps which will make your life easier.
1. What type of photography are you going to do?
In brief, photography can be distinguished in a number of categories:
1.1. Indoor Photography
When you are planning to do a lot of indoor photography like shooting events mostly arranged indoors. Under this category you will mostly be shooting photos inside your premises, wedding halls, party halls, etc.
- You will be using external flash units a lot.
- You might have to shoot in no flash zones for which you will have to switch to high ISO settings.
- Due to dark conditions you will have to switch to lower shutter speed thus making an impact on the image quality due to hand shake i.e. Image stabilization.
- For image stabilization you will also have to have a tripod.
1.2. Night Photography
This is almost close to an indoor photography category and you will be mostly shooting stars, moon, city lights, fireworks, etc. under dark conditions.
- Again you will be using external flash units with longer range a lot.
- You will be looking to shoot images with the lowest possible noise/ grains with highest possible ISO settings.
- Due to dark conditions you will have to switch to lower shutter speed thus making an impact on the image quality due to hand shake i.e. Image stabilization.
- For fireworks you cannot afford even a little bit of shake which can be caused due to shutter release button. Under this scenario a remote shutter release will do a great job.
- Adding to image stabilization you will also have to have a tripod or at least a monopod.
1.3. Portrait Photography
Under this category you will mostly be capturing peoples’ faces. You will be interacting with the people surrounding you noticing and finally capturing their facial expressions on your camera.
- Since the importance here will be the facial expressions, you will be shooting with a shallow depth of field, capturing only and only the face and partial body. You will be ignoring out the surroundings or any other objects which distracts the viewer. Here comes the aperture or the f-stops. This is basically considered when you are buying a lens but DSLR body is nothing without a lens I guess J
- Even a little shake in your camera can blur out sharp little expressions on you subject’s face. You will have to activate Image Stabilization to overcome this.
- If you are a person who doesn’t like to do post production stuff then you will probably like the inbuilt feature to apply different filters to your capture picture like Monochrome, Fisheye, Glow, etc. In fact these days DSLRs have an option to enhance color, contrast or even reflection from bright objects. In my case I love doing post production stuff using Adobe Photo Elements or even Google’s Picasa tool.
- Some times after taking a shot you also want to review the captures image and believe me a big 3.5 inches live view (LCD) will make a great positive difference.
1.4. Sports Photography
If you are a sport lover I am sure you will love to capture those moments when a soccer player is jumping while giving cheers after winning a game. You will surely want to freeze that moment when the player is in air with a great winning expression and body language.
- Sports here depict the speed of events, you will curse yourself on missing even a single act, and you would take a burst of shots with highest number of frames per second.
- You will be capturing each and every action of the player by lowering down the shutter speed to its limits.
- Since you will be shooting a burst of images, your camera should have a huge buffer to hold and process the image before saving it to the media.
- Players during a sport often change their position and it would be great if your camera could allow you to focus manually to a multi focusing points.
1.5. Macro Photography
I am a person who believes in the power of little ones. I love to shoot insects, wild flower, rain droplets on ivy, and many other small subjects. If you are the kind of person who wants to capture that little beauty then you are a macro photographer.
- You will be reaching out to that honey bee resting on a sun flower to capture its smile J for this you will either be buying expensive macro lenses or adapters to convert your regular lenses to a macro one. Your camera should adapt to not only the previous generation lenses but also the adapters and lenses available by the third party like Sigma. This is called Camera adaptability.
- Shooting at extremely close distance can make your hands to shake and thus resulting to a blurry image. Activating the Image stabilization feature will surely make a big impact.
- Your body might have to go against ergonomic rules but it would be better for your body and of course camera to be equipped with a big LCD Screen to have live view action without leaning yourself below the ground level J
- At such an extreme closeness your external flash unit mounted on hot shoe might not work. It would be great if you could set it on remote flash mode and place it aside pointing in the direction of the subject.
1.6. Outdoor/ Landscape Photography
If you love those huge green mountains with human less spots, or you travel a lot with fully equipped photo gears then you are in right section.
- Based on the scenes you will often change your lenses thus risking your cameras optics to expose dust. Now-a-days most of the DSLRs are coming equipped with dust removal feature. You have an option to set the dust removal at startup or at the time of shutting down or even both.
- Working outside in extreme weather might harm your lenses, it would be better to buy precautionary filters beforehand.
- Carrying a lot of weight in the form of camera, lens kit, tripod makes huge impact while you are travelling. A light weight camera and its adaptable accessories will work like a blessing.
- As I said earlier to eliminate hand shake blurs and avoiding image ruins your camera must have an Image Stabilization feature.
- You will be shooting far off distances to capture that little log wood hut at the top of uphill. To shoot these subjects it would better equipped with an extended dynamic range.
- Again to avoid post production processing it would be better to have inbuilt feature to apply filters and enhance true colors.
1.7. Studio Photography
So you are fully equipped with a studio and a variety of lights. You must be having a huge collection of fixed lights and remote flashes, reflectors, etc. Along with Image Stabilization, live view, inbuilt color enhancing features your camera must support all those bunch of lighting accessories.
Step 1 Summary
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Category |
Features |
| 1.1 | Indoor Photography |
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| 1.2 | Night Photography |
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| 1.3 | Portrait Photography |
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| 1.4 | Sports Photography |
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| 1.5 | Macro Photography |
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| 1.6 | Outdoor/ Landscape Photography |
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| 1.7 | Studio Photography |
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Continued in “Choosing a DSLR (Part-II)”
Please leave a comment so as to let me know that this post is at least helping some one
Tags: Aspect Ratio, Auto Focus, Burst Mode, Camera Buffer, Choosing DSLR, Compare DSLR, Continuous Mode, DSLR, DSLR Buffer, Dust Reduction, Flash, FPS, Frames Per Second, Image Sensor, Image Sensor Size, Image Stability, Large Buffer, LCD, Live View, Photography, Photosites, Pixels, Sensor Type, Vibration Reduction, Viefinder
Posted in: Choosing a DSLR , Photography
Nice post!! looking forward to read more..
I am interested for 1.1,1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.6, can you please suggest which camera, I can go with?