Digital Camera

I think just a *flash alone* that will work at "a few hundred yards" would be more than $900, but this one has almost everything else, except raw shooting:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/Canon-G7.shtml

Do not even consider the Canon G7 referenced above. It may be a decent point-and-shoot, but it lacks RAW format which is unacceptable.

IMO best would be a Canon or Nikon DSLR; DSLR gives you the ability to add quality lenses and flash units as your photo needs grow. Two DSLRs you should look at on the low end are Nikon's D40 and D50. Nikon's low end DSLRs and kit lenses tend to be better than Canon's low end. As you move up the price scale both brands provide similar value, but with models at different price points.

-Allen Wicks

The problem with SLRs are its size and carrying multiple lenses to take full advantage of the system. Nice thing about high-end P&S cameras these days are that they provide long optical zoom and lots of mega pixels (but on a small sensor so it is bit noiser but there are sw filters that do nice job to clean that up - noise ninja, neat image).

I am assuming the comment:

"I was looking for something with a great zoom, great lightning so that I can take beautiful pictures of the Vatican even few hundred yards away"

Means you want a good postcard images. And great lighting means good color, saturation and vibrance, and not flash.

I too have, no longer thank goodness, traveled significantly over the years and found that SLR to be too heavy and bulky for my taste. That said, I use DSLR almost exclusively now with pocket-sized thin P&S handy for non-critical shoots. The latter does not shoot raw and I don't care. It takes quite good jpeg images. For me an image is about capturing the moment and being there at the right place and the right time. I carry the P&S when I am not thinking about taking photos but just out an about or don't want camera to get in the way (e.g., skiing, biking, playing with my kids,...).

My recommendation is to first ask yourself what are you willing to carry/lug around on travel. If you want a DSLR, the recommendation of D50 with 20-200 zoom may be the best bet so that you don't have to change the lens but it sort of defeats the purpose of SLR (there is Cannon or other brand equivalent, I know about Nikon because I shoot Nikon). That said, already, its over 900.00, I believe.

Or, you can buy one of 10 mega pixel P&S with large zoom. You can crop further to gain additional magnification effect, as long as the optics are good. This, I know you can find for less than 900.00 complete. And your family can point and shoot as now.

Aperture will work with jpeg, or tiff but it works best with Raw files as long as Apple supports the raw format you shoot (D40 is not supported yet).

The second poster provided you with a link to G7. The site, Luminous Landscape, is an excellent site for understanding various aspect of photography and I highly recommend it.

Here is a link to DPReview that provides reviews of various camera.

http://www.dpreview.com/

Good luck.

MBP Mac OS X (10.4.8) Boot Camp/XP Pro

Have you looked at SLR-like cameras such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50? My first camera was an FZ20, and I loved it. 12x zoom and most of the manual controls of an SLR, in the $500 price range. The FZ50 has RAW, but unfortunately Aperture doesn't support Panasonic cameras much at all right now.

When I travel I only bring my Panasonic FZ30 (today it's called FZ50). It's the ultimate hobo camera for me.

What about the Nikon D70?? I know a friend that has
it and she just loves it??

D70 is older technology.

-Allen Wicks

Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by Aperture not supporting Panasonic cameras. I have a FZ20 and just finished shooting 4000 pictures on a trip to the Amazon, Machu Picchu, and the Galapagos.

For sorting and post processing Aperture was a real time saver. But I didn't import the images through Aperture, because I wanted to manage my images and I was not about to leave these to the young and tender mercies of ANY program. The images were imported using Image Capture, sorted by day, and then imported into Aperture.

Just for the heck of it, after writing that last line, I decided to see what problems that I might have. When I plugged the cable from my camera into my Mac, Aperture opened and asked where I wanted to put the images and then offered to erase the card or just demount the memory card.

Has Panasonic changed so much that the FZ50 will not do the same?

Regards,
Don O'Shea

Lack of Raw is not necessarily a deal breaker.

Here is a professional who considers it a waste:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

Horses for courses, as they say.

And, since we are talking about Aperture, it might take a few months (or never!) for Apple to support the camera. 8^)

I took the fact that he wanted good shots from a few hundred yards of the vatican to interpret "lightning" as "flash"

Don,

Were those shots RAW files or JPEGs? Aperture will support JPEGs from any camera on the planet, because JPEG files, unlike RAW files, are a standard. Support one JPEG, support them all (modulo bugs). RAW support, on the other hand, needs a specific converter for each and every camera on the planet. So, say, about 3000 times as much work as JPEG if you wanted to support 3000 different cameras 😉

Bill, they were JPEGs. So, I stand corrected. My camera didn't have the ability to store RAWs.

From what I understand, RAW support is based on the procedure by which each camera manufacture chooses to dump the CCD content to a file. Sometime it's hard to tell who is at fault in such cases.

Thanks for the question.

Don O'Shea

There are a couple things about RAW that are important:

* The files contain more photographic detail than JPEGs (e.g. 14 or 16 bits per channel, compared to 8 in a JPEG, and they use lossless compression versus lossy compression, which is always nice). All else being equal (size, speed, ease of use in processing), RAW would always be preferable to JPEG.

* There is no standard for RAW files. How exactly the data needs to be interpreted varies. There is tag information in there (white balance, raw CCD or CMOS dump, price of tea in China... pretty much whatever the camera vendor wants to put in there... including any "secret sauce."). There's no standard so each must be handled separately, and also the "helpfulness" of camera vendors (Canon, Nikon, Foveon/Sigma, Hasselblad, Phase One, etc.) to assist 3rd party software vendors (Adobe, Apple, Picasa, ...) in decrypting the RAW files "accurately" varies greatly. The vendors need to balance the need to be "helpful" so customers can use their cameras with 3rd party software, with their desire to sell their own RAW decoding software (Nikon Capture), and to withhold their "secret sauce" which they may consider proprietary.

There are efforts to "standardize" RAW files (e.g. Adobe DNG), but these have their own negatives -- probably the main one that the camera vendors want to control their own RAW formats (it's MY sensor, thankyouverymuch) and not be beholden to Adobe, so we'll see if the "Standard" ever becomes standard for the market dominant digital camera companies. For smaller ones (e.g. Leica) it makes sense. While they are absolutely top notch in film rangefinders, they are a miniscule portion of the market in digital... for now. Though I salivate at their new $4000 wonder cam 🙂

how about the Nikon D 70??

The D70 has been superseded by the D80, However, this with a lens will exceed the $900. The D70 is still a great camera, and while "older" technology, the changes to get to the D80 are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Consider a used D70, preferably the D70S model, which would get you under the $900, depending on lens. The D50 is also a good choice.

A key question remains how much you want to lug around. I loved the compact size of the P&S cameras, but the quality of the images from a larger size sensor in terms of beter noise and other qualities such as speed (turn on and shot to shot), better controls, and flexibility with lenses outweighs the size and weight advantage of a P&S for me. Raw shooting adds additional flexibility in image processing.

If you are not sure about the committment to a DSLR, then a used camera would minimize your loss, investment wise, if you didn't like it and sold it later.