I’m totally new to photography and want to get my first camera. I’ll mainly be using it for nature photography while hiking and traveling.

My only focus is on photos of the highest possible quality.

My budget is around $600, and I’ll also need essential accessories, but don’t know what I’d need, like a lens?

Not open to refurbished, as I’m buying in Vietnam.

  • SurpriZe@lemm.eeOP
    1·
    2 days ago

    What would be the main difference between it and taking pictures with my Redmi Note 13 ? Would I be able to zoom in much further in with much greater detail photos overall? Or would it be a negligible difference? I’d love to try macro photography

    • stoy
      1·
      2 days ago

      The main difference, that is a big question…

      I’ll narrow it in scope, since we are talking about cameras, I’ll focus on those points.

      • The sensor, the R50 has a decent APS-C sized sensor, that is much bigger than the kinds of sensor that are used in phones, this means that more light will be collected giving you the option to experiment more with different photo styles.
      • The lens, the R50 uses interchangeable lenses, this has major advantages and and some disadvantages. It allows you to customize your gear for the type of photos you want to take, it allows one camera to be customized into several different roles and it also allows for better control of how the the photo will look, but since you basically disassemble the camera everytime you swap lenses, you expose the sensor to dust and dirt.
      • The controls, phones doesn’t really have the space for controls on the device, you are normally forced to rely on touchscreen controls that are at best servicable, but a camera has a lot of physical controls, looking at photos of the R50, I can see that is has one control wheel, that is normally used for direct control of shutter speed/apature/exposure depending on the mode your camera is in, you also have a proper zoom and focus ring on the lenses, giving you further control.
      • The ergonomics, a phone in camera mode has terrible ergonomics, the R50 has a proper grip for the right hand while the left hand will hold onto the lens, this gives you added stability and allows you to take sharper photos quicker.

      Zoom, well that depends on the lens, but I can tell you one thing, phones have limited space for an optical zoom system, and often rely on digital zoom to make up the difference, to be blunt, digital zoom is basically just cropping and stretching the photo to make it look zoomed in, that means that you loose data in the image that you could have used when editing photos later.

      Regarding macro photography, I don’t know much about it as I don’t really take macro photos, I have taken some fantastic photos of insects with my old Lumix GX80 and a 14-140mm zoom lens, but that was just trial and error.

      If you want to take macro photos, look for lenses marked Macro, but don’t discount normal lenses out of hand, my 14-140mm lens was just a normal lens but happened to work well in that segment, so take it slow and learn.