« Which camera do you use » and « which camera should I buy » are probably among the most frequently heard questions a photographer – even an amateur such as myself – hears when discussing photography with non-photographers. This is an answer to the second question, with an incidental answer to the first on along the way. Obviously, this post is geared towards beginners, experienced photographers know all this. Although a good reminder can never hurt…
Totally irrelevant stuff
Many people, in part due to the influence of IT in our mindsets, will obsess over numbers, such as Mega-pixels, or occasionally ISO or shutter speed. While these numbers obviously have an impact, nobody should start off their quest for a camera by worrying about those. If you’re an amateur, any camera these days will have more than enough mega-pixels for what you’ll be doing. More mega-pixels doesn’t make better pictures, it only allows you to print larger or crop more heavily. If you’re not sure what a number on a camera means, it is irrelevant to you.
Trust me. That’s not your criterion.
Slightly more relevant stuff
A better question is what you’ll be doing with your camera. Depending on your intended use, a camera might or might not fit your needs. And yes, that might have an impact on those numbers I just discarded, but only if you’ve identified why you need them first. The most prominent example of this in my mind is action/sports shooting. People who will be doing a lot of this need fast shutter speeds, combined with long, bright lenses. And a nice budget by the way. Most people however, including advanced amateurs, want a mix of things. A bit of portrait, a bit of landscape, some low-light, some outdoors, some artsy things, and really anything they can get away with. This means that for most people, a camera will always be a compromise, because no single camera is the best at everything (assuming that there is a camera that is unequivocally the best at any one thing, which is debatable).
Related to this is the question of what you mean by “a camera”. Do you want to buy one camera and forget about it, or do you want to buy into a system you might want to expand (with new lenses, flashes, and eventually bodies)?
These criteria are helpful because they help you narrow your choices down. But they don’t give you your final choice.
The important stuff
The best camera in the world (if there were such a thing) won’t guarantee your pictures are any good. You are the one taking the pictures. So the most important element is you. Which means the most important requirement for a camera is that you like it and are comfortable using it. All the rest is secondary.
What matters is your level of comfort and pleasure using your camera. Because if you’re comfortable with it and enjoy using it, you’ll use it more, practice more and get better. You’ll use it better because you are more attuned to how it works and how to achieve what you want with it. Sure you might hit its limitations once in a while, but that’s a good trade-off if you take more and better pictures, and you might just learn how to work around its limitations. And you'll grow as a photographer in the process, since limitations often spur creativity.
I’ll give my own little example as an illustration. I was looking for a camera I could carry around with me all the time (so that I could take business related pictures mostly). After having been lent one by a friend, I acquired a Fuji X100S. It’s easy to carry around under a suit without it being seen or feeling the weight of it, it takes gorgeous pictures, and most importantly, I enjoyed the very physical feel of it. Working with physical dials for aperture and shutter speed was so much more pleasant to me than working with DSLR type menus I just fell in love with using it. I ultimately switched to Fuji completely and now also own an X-T1. Again, the physical dials are much more pleasing to me than menus, knowing exactly how it is set before it is even turned on is nice to me, the lens range from Fuji is amazing, and the weight and size are much more comfortable to me than full-frame Nikons or Canons I was considering as alternatives. Yet not working full frame has its drawbacks for me, especially as I enjoy low-light event photography without flash, an area where full-frames have a slight technical advantage. By using Fuji, I also miss out on very long focal lengths. But because I love these cameras, my photographs are improving, and I take more of them. I carry my cameras around more. I might have missed a few pictures I could have been able to take with a full frame camera, but I’ve taken dozens more I wouldn’t have with full frame, because I wouldn’t have bothered with my camera in the first place. You will have noticed this is all about my own personal preferences and comfort, yours might be completely different.
So try a camera out. Feel it. Will you be comfortable with it? Those are the most important questions. Do, by all means, learn about its capabilities and figure out if the trade-offs it implies are acceptable to you. But always bear in mind whether you’ll enjoy shooting with it (and carrying it around). Because that’s what matters most and will allow you to (learn to) take great pictures. As the old saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you.