MightyFunk

I’m updat­ing my research into cam­eras for cre­at­ing HDR pho­tos. As of this writ­ing, I’m putting 360-degree HDR imagery on hold. To be com­pletely frank, you will want a Nikon D300 or a Canon Mark III series cam­era in order to pro­duce ade­quate HDRs with the min­i­mal amount of work involved. You may ask why, but my rea­son­ing involves fast shut­ter speeds/frame bursts for min­i­mal blur and arti­facts, greater AEB range, and full-sized frames.

Presently, the Canon Mark III 1d retails for $4,000-$4,500. Even the Mark III 1d doesn’t have a full-sized frame which means that your images are going to be cropped mak­ing 360-degree panora­mas more work. To add to this, the pro­fes­sional cam­era lines do not take Canon EF-S lenses (which are gen­er­ally of lower qual­ity glass com­pared to Canon’s L series lenses.) This means that you will prob­a­bly be dish­ing out $1,000 for each EF lens you need for a Mark III — and to get a full range of lenses, you’re prob­a­bly look­ing at 3–4 lenses which means an addi­tional $3,000-$4,000 on top of the Mark III 1d price tag.

All said and done, that’s a $7,000-$9,000 cam­era rig that I can’t cur­rently justify.

Come late July of 2008, I am pre­dict­ing a major price drop in all the high-end cam­eras from Nikon and Canon. Sony (which is part­nered with Minolta) will be releas­ing a 24-megapixel Alpha cam­era that will be priced extremely com­pet­i­tively. Esti­mates put this cam­era at around the $3,500 range. For those that don’t know, 24 megapix­els is huge and destroys any megapixel out there. The qual­ity of lenses it can accept is unknown to me. How­ever, I can only think to expect a major price-war and drop in pro­fes­sional level cam­era prices as this will be a flag­ship camera.

For now, my tem­po­rary solu­tion is to get a Canon Rebel XSI (gasp) while stock­ing up on EF L IS level/quality lenses. This way come late July or August when the price war does begin, I can upgrade my cam­era body to a higher level then at a frac­tion of it’s cur­rent costs. It makes sense to have great glass/lenses and a not-so-powerful cam­era, ver­sus the other way around.

My per­sonal opin­ion (and that of many pro­fes­sion­als), is that the XTI/XSI are actu­ally remark­able cam­eras that can do an amaz­ing job in the right-hands. How­ever, you do need great cam­era lenses to get high-quality results. As for my own work-related pur­poses in cre­at­ing HDRs, they just can’t do what I want them to do as eas­ily as a pro­fes­sional series can. For now how­ever, own­ing a XSI will fill in those sum­mer months of tak­ing ordi­nary photographs.