Shop: A Digital Camera for Travel
Buy Smart and Take Quality Vacation Pictures
Want to capture your trip with great photographs? Here's what you need to have before getting on the plane.
The Camera: Going Digital
A good traveling camera is digital and lightweight, with a high enough pixel count, decent LCD screen, and a solid optical zoom. If you already have a camera that fits this description, great. You can skip ahead to Photographing Your Vacation. If you don’t have a camera, or if your camera doesn’t meet these standards, it’s time to start shopping.
There are many reasons to go digital these days, especially while traveling. Here are a few of the biggies:
- Immediate Viewing: you can view a picture right after you take it. If the picture isn’t right, you can try again. It’s a shame to go all the way to the Eiffel Tower and get your picture taken, only to develop the film back home and discover that you were blinking.
- Airport Security: required screening devices may cause color damage, bands, and blurring on film. The TSA suggests that you request film to be hand-inspected from your carry-on, but security may not always comply. Also, hand-inspection may not be standard procedure a foreign country. Your film is at even greater risk in checked baggage. Airports are a photographer’s nightmare. Unless you have digital.
- Lots of Pictures, Lower Costs: You can take as many pictures as your memory card will hold with a digital camera. Save money later by only printing the best photographs.
The Camera: Shopping Around
Finding the right camera will depend on what type of photography you want to do, your experience level, and your price range. It is important to do a lot of internet research, followed by some playing around with cameras in the store, before you buy. Look at the “specs” section of a camera manufacturer’s web page to get the hard facts on what a camera can do. For personal use travel photography, a camera should have these basics:
- Good Pixel Count: Pixels are the little dots that make up a digital image. If a camera’s pixel count is lower than 3MP (3 million pixels), you risk poor picture quality. The larger you print low-pixel images, the more likely it is that the picture will appear fragmented and noise filled. To be safe, make sure your camera has a minimum of 4 or 5 megapixels.
- Acceptable Sensor Size: Lots of pixels alone do not create good resolution. A large sensor reduces noise in the image and increases sensitivity to different levels of light (measured by ISO). It is nearly impossible to get a compact digital camera with a large sensor, but avoid the smallest ones. Make sure that “sensor resolution” is a high enough pixel count, and find a camera with a wide ISO range (400 is often the highest you can get in a compact).
- Decent LCD Screen: This is the screen on the back of most digital cameras where you can view your pictures. You may also use this screen to navigate the camera’s menu or set up your shots. The LCD screen has no impact on the final image quality but is important for setting up and checking your pictures. Because people have such a wide range of eyesight quality, you should try out some different cameras in the store. Screen size, viewing angle (at least 130 degrees so that you can compose a picture over other tourists’ heads) and resolution (high resolution of 200,000+ pixels is a nice perk for viewing images and makes the menu easier to navigate) are some factors to consider.
- Optical Zoom: Optical zoom is essential for the traveler, who may be photographing monuments at a distance or interesting landscapes on the horizon. Digital zoom is often advertised to mislead the buyer to think that a camera has greater zoom capacity than it really does. Don’t be fooled. Digital zoom is not really a zoom at all, but merely an automatic cropping tool. This reduces the pixel count and may lead to poor quality images.
- Lithium Battery: Most cameras either operate with traditional store-bought batteries (like Energizer) or with lithium batteries. While the store-bought kind are familiar and have their benefits, lithium is preferable for travel, when you are likely to be using your camera all day long. Store-bought batteries won’t last as long, and it is a pain to stop once or twice a day to buy new ones. Charge a lithium battery overnight and it will probably last all day. It’s also good to have a backup.
Handy Accessories for Travel
The most commonly useful camera accessories for travel are:
- A Camera Strap or Carrying Case: Thieves that view a tourist as an “easy mark” will have more trouble stealing a camera if it’s on a strap around your neck. You can buy thick straps with wire running through them, making the strap harder to cut. A wide variety of over-the-shoulder camera cases are also available, and might be better for the fashion-conscious. Just make sure your case also has a sturdy strap and thick, rainproof material, and that it isn’t too easy to unzip. Women can put their camera in a secure purse.
- An Extra Battery: If you can afford an extra lithium battery, it may come in handy. If your camera operates on traditional batteries, bring along more than a couple fresh ones, and make sure to use rechargeable versions.
- Memory Storage: Whether your camera uses Compact Flash, Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick, XD, Smart Media, Multimedia… or whatever else may become available after the writing of this article, make sure to have an extra memory card on hand. A 250 MB card may be appropriate for a short trip, but anyone who is on a long vacation or is simply camera-happy will want at least 1GB.
Find simple tips for better vacation pictures with your new camera in the article Photographing Your Vacation.
The copyright of the article Shop: A Digital Camera for Travel in Travel Photography is owned by Elizabeth Nelson. Permission to republish Shop: A Digital Camera for Travel must be granted by the author in writing.
