These are incredible pictures. What kind of camera did you use to click these?
"These are great pictures, you must have a great camera!"
Caveat: You can take great pictures with a camera-phone but you can't take every type of shot.
I think any DSLR with a good choice of glass (lenses) would be able to reproduce most of these shots. More expensive camera bodies are only slightly better in the optical sense but are MUCH better constructed.
Framing, aperture selection and patience plays a bigger part. Most photographers take a prolific amount of pictures, expect to only keep about 1-10% of the shots you take.
Digital cameras are a wonderful thing!
A good mirrorless could take most of these shots as well, though I suspect by the time you installed a lens long enough for the wildlife shots[1], it wouldn't be much lighter than the DSLR.
1 - I didn't check the EXIF data, but assume he was using at least 200mm, probably longer, for those shots.
Take a Canon SX60, having a lens that's 21-1365mm (sic) 35 mm equivalent. Admittedly the sensor is much worse, etc., but this covers most of that 6 lens range (apart from wide apertures at high tele).
In the middle of a hot summer day, the 800mm end on my superzoom is near-useless, but at or after sunset it's much better. Still very noticeable difference from your 800mm prime, I guess, but less so than at midday.
The biggest differences are going to be low light conditions and controlling depth of field (portraits, etc). Also, motion (sports, wildlife), where the ability to easily focus manually ahead of time can make a huge difference.
Most of my photo-hobbyist friends (myself included) have moved away from DSLR to one of the mirrorless systems. I use MFT, and quite a few use Fuji X.
That's one of the big advantages of Micro Four-Thirds - if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of sensor area, you get very bright and lightweight telephoto lenses.
The reason I sold my Canon gear and went MFT was the size - it's almost pocketable and easily fits in a small backpack when travelling. Adding even a moderate telephoto ruins it for me.
Are you OK with manual glass? If so, check out the Samyang 135mm f/2. If that's still too big, the Pentax 135mm f/2.5 or Nikkor 105/2.5 are both quite compact (roughly the size of a can of soda) and will provide you with a little more reach. None of those is a native M4/3 lens, so you will need to buy them in a Nikon or Pentax mount and use an adapter.
On the other hand - with a smaller sensor you get worse low-light performance, increased noise, poorer resolution, a greater difficulty with diffraction limit degrading your resolution[1], and decreased ability to isolate a subject. In technical terms, bigger sensors are where it's at.
It's certainly true that smaller sensors let you get more reach out of a piece of glass - but it's always funny that M4/3 is raised as the "ideal" format for doing this somehow, as if APS-C is not already smaller than full frame, or that there do not exist even smaller sensors which can give you even more reach.
Mirrorless bodies like the NEX system that let you cram big sensors into a small body size are definitely one of the more interesting developments recently. Especially the Fuji/Hasselblad collaboration that puts a digital medium-format sensor into a MILC body. The Fuji X-series are very interesting and well-designed cameras and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.
When I go on vacation I take an Olympus XA and a Fuji GS 645 folding camera for a nice combination of fields-of-view in a compact size. But at this point I'm really ogling the Fuji X-series...
[0] I've done this, uncropped photo with slightly missed focus: http://i.imgur.com/oFpu8JE.jpg
[1] Small sensors like M4/3 need to produce enough resolution to saturate their sensor at an extremely wide aperture, roughly by f/4 or so for a 16 mp sensor: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photo...
The Olympus E-M1 MkII is fairly competitive with APS-C sensors, but you get significantly more reach. For most photographers, that extra reach is neither here nor there. The extra depth of field of a smaller sensor is more hindrance than help in a lot of cases. If you're a wildlife photographer who normally shoots with very long lenses, it's a compelling advantage.
- Is the amount that is prolific? Or is it the photographers?
Someone please help me or I won't be able to go to sleep.
I would have said "Most photographers are prolific."
[edit]: while I generally agree with the sibling posts that it's not always the camera that matters, having a high end DSLR makes all the difference in the world for certain types of shots and situations. Others have pointed out many of the benefits but one of the biggest for me is the handling. Having dedicated (and programmable) buttons and viewfinder displays for all the key features mean that it's extremely quick to change camera settings (ISO/aperture/focal points/exposure compensation etc) to suit the moment, without having to hunt through menus or look at the screen. It takes a lot of practice before this becomes second nature though. I've seen a lot of people buy a high end camera thinking it will magically produce better results than a point and shoot. These people often end up disappointed because their results actually end up far worse because they haven't taken the time to learn how to use their equipment properly.
This is an incredible comment. What keyboard did you use to write it?
(Camera choice doesn't matter beyond certain ergonomics and certain capabilities (low noise, more room for cropping, shallow DOF, etc, a lot of which depend on the lens as well). Any $300+ DSLR can give you the exact same results, as can a lot of mirrorless with a speedy lens. And for most of the pictures shown, any modern compact or even smartphone will do just as well).
* very low noise
* very shallow DOF
* long bursts of rapid images
* weather proofing (including cold)
* improved dynamic range
* high resolution (lets you crop the part you are interested in and retain good quality)
There are also other improvements such as better autofocus.
Which means, no a $300 camera will not be good enough for some of these shots.
PS: I use a MFT camera myself and it's good enough for my needs.
In other words, your $1300 lens on a crop body will have comparable performance of a $350 lens on the full frame body.
That's the point the parent you're replying to is making.
It is physically impossible to achieve the kind of equivalence you mentioned in your first post because the 'crop factor' is also applied to aperture and the crop-factor squared is applied to the ISO.
That's a point that's not well known and often dismissed, so I'll repeat it: The crop factor is applied to aperture and the square of the crop factor is applied to the ISO.
If you are not aware of this/don't believe it, see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtDotqLx6nA
Manufacturers like to gloss over that and constantly talk about 'equivalent' focal length whilst skirting the other equivalents, because they would clearly show the physical (as in physics) limitations of the smaller sensor.
It may well be that a 50mm f1.2 on a 300D would look 'nicer' than a cheaper 85mm f1.4, but that could be due to lens construction/coatings etc and it literally cannot be due to achieving the same focal length/aperture/ISO performance. You cannot physically achieve the same depth of field (let alone focal length) for instance with a 50mm f1.2 on APS-C as an 85mm f1.4 lens on a full frame.
That's the technicality you are being picked up on (albeit in a slightly imprecise manner), so save that trip to B&H because it'll be impossible to achieve what you are saying.
Source: Former pro photographer (and less important but I've used the lenses you mention).
To demonstrate why you're also wrong with overall quality, consider the Canon 5Ds/5DsR. An incredible 50-something megapixels; famous for being able to reveal flaws in (or at least exceed the limits of) some of the most expensive glass. This is because its pixel pitch of 4.14µm is so incredibly fine.
The latest APS-C bodies, the 80D for example, have a pixel pitch of 3.7µm, which is even finer still. Using full frame glass on an APS-C body is like putting it on a hypothetical 5Ds Mark II and cropping into the middle 40% in post. It's just not going to be sharp.
This is because when you put that expensive full frame lens onto an APS-C body, you're only using half of the actual physical glass you paid for. The rest of it is going to waste. You're just using the middle bit... then magnifying it to accentuate the flaws.
The issue entirely boils down to using lenses optimised for one sensor size (in this case full frame) on a camera that has a significantly smaller sensor (in this case APS-C).
Also, I went through 4 or 5 85 1.4s to find a sharp one because the built quality was so bad, and even after a couple of weeks traveling it had gone soft, never found this with my 50 1.2 (although I ended up ditching all the crop gear and going to FF when I bought the 85 1.2) - However, it was a really good substitute till I could afford it (as I mentioned above) :)
It all depends on what kind of photography you're doing, and your personal style.
For me, getting that shallow DOF is a nice-to-have, but it's not what I'm typically going for. More likely, I'm using a 7-14mm lens (on my m43 camera, if it you care), which for most reasonable compositions has infinite DOF if you just use hyperfocal distance.
It is true that the cheaper lens has slightly greater pincushion distortion and vignetting, however both flaws are trivially (and automatically) corrected in post processing. What can't be fixed in post is overall sharpness and depth-of-field.
[1] https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Canon/EF50mm-f-1.2L-USM-mount...
[2] https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Canon/Canon-EF85mm-f-1.8-USM-...
Only as it pertains to DOF. On the other hand, it will still be a 1.2 lens as far as light gathering is concerned.
And you can get a 35mm 1.2 for your 50mm equivalent on APS-C.
The loss of DOF we know, but you still so much DOF latitude on APS-C that you can do pretty much anything. Besides, that 50mm will become a quite handy portrait lens on APS-C.
Also incorrect, because less than 40% of the light gathered by a full frame lens hits the APS-C sensor.
According to DxOMark[1][2], the $1400 Canon 35mm f/1.4 on an APS-C body is comparable to a Canon 50mm f/1.8 STM on full frame and stopped down to f/2.4.
[1] https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Canon/Canon-EF-35mm-F14L-USM-...
[2] https://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Canon/Canon-EF-50mm-F18-STM-m...
In any situation where I feel like I would benefit from a larger sensor I shoot film instead (either 35mm or 120 and get better colors and tones than any DSLR, in my opinion).
The "shallow DOF" can be achieved with a longer lens on a crop-factor camera. And most landscape pictures (such as those) use the hyperfocal distance anyway.
A "expensive full frame" camera will have better "low noise" but marginally so compared to a APS C or even 4/3rds camera with the latest (4-5 years) generation of sensors. We're simply above the point of having new cameras really give anything beyond marginal returns in ISO utility (not because they don't get better ISO, but because so much sensitivity is useless for most kinds of photography, including most of landscape work (plus, it affects color rendition). In any case, in all the history of film photography, all known celebrated photographs seldom straiyed outside something like 800-1600 ISO. Not sure why we need 6400+ today, except for pissing contents and/or stalking).
Now, while most of the points are real, they are all marginal returns, and depend so much upon the conditions at the shoot and the skill of the photographer that they might as well not matter at all.
I'd go as far as to say that a $300 APS-C used well will be able to take just as good photos as any $5K full frame (yeah, it might lose a couple of stops of DOF, just use a faster lens on it), and even an expensive lens on the latter wont make that much of a different at any normal print size (at least up to A3).
I agree with your overall point - and I've pretty much abandoned my APS-C camera, using my M43 camera almost exclusively.
However, there is a good reason for better high-ISO performance. It allows for tradeoffs in other areas. It means we can hand-hold in darker lighting or at higher focal lengths or smaller lighting than anyone could before. The ability to take a sharp photo while out on a hike when I didn't want to lug a tripod is valuable.