When we got home from our first trip to Disney World with our boys in 2013, I was looking through our trip photos and found myself feeling very disappointed. While we did make use of the PhotoPass photographers when we could (it was a relatively short trip, so we didn’t spend a lot of time looking for them), I had relied on a Sony point-and-shoot digital camera to capture as many candid shots as I could. The pictures were nice, but they were lacking the crispness, detail, and nice color that I’d seen in so many pictures posted in Disney groups and forums around the web. At the time, I had over 20 years of experience in retouching and editing digital photography, but my experience in actually capturing great pictures to begin with was pretty much limited to random luck and chance lighting.
I bet you can guess what I did next.
Yup. I did tons of research about cameras. Finally, I joined a Facebook photography group focused on Disney and started asking questions – mostly about equipment and especially which camera would be good for a beginner that wouldn’t cost two arms, a leg, and the cord-blood of my first-born son. The responses were wonderful! They were supportive and kind, and honest about the different models I was inquiring about. After some discussion, I decided to toss out any preconceptions I had and went with the camera most suggested by those who had extensive photography experience – a refurbished Canon Rebel T5. The price was definitely right – $439 on sale for $299, and it was a camera I knew I could grow with as well as acquire new lenses and accessories for as I gained experience.
The one thing I wasn’t prepared for? How much I loved it! I took it out of the box, put in the battery and SDHC card, and started snapping pics using the automatic settings. It was SO easy to use and takes pictures so much faster than a point-and-shoot even with red-eye-reduction and the flash on, and it didn’t feel overly heavy in my hands – something I was more than a little concerned about with any camera with a changeable lens.
You may recall that I wrote about how larger lenses are able to capture more light and generate a better image here. I’m going to use the same image from that post because the differences can be so striking in the range of colors captured on a DSLR camera relative to those captured by an iPhone 8. Top is the photo from the iPhone 8 (which has the same image quality as an iPhone X), and bottom is the Canon Rebel T5.
The phone and camera were both the same distance from these flowers, but notice that the Canon photo is much larger than the one from the iPhone. The complete image size from the iPhone is 56″x 42″, while the Canon captures pictures at 72″x 48″. The height difference in landscape mode doesn’t seem like very much, but every little bit helps, the Canon also captures a much wider image, and there is quite a difference in the color ranges captured by the two cameras.
Relatively speaking, DSLR cameras are said to take “flat” images straight out of the camera, but as you can see, it does capture a much higher range of colors than the iPhone, which tends to artificially pump up color while sometimes washing out colors on the paler end of the color spectrum, like the pale yellows you see above.
Now with my background in photo editing, there is RARELY an instance in which I leave an image exactly as it came from the camera…so here are the before (top) and after editing (bottom) shots of the above photo from the Canon Rebel T5. Notice how much more vibrant the greens and darker pinks are, and that you can make out the bird’s nest much better in the edited version.
And another example – a picture I took of my son for the last day of school.
There are many cameras out there better than a Rebel T5, but for a beginner it definitely fills the bill, I think I was pointed in a great direction. More importantly, I can now capture the kinds of photos that really capture all the fun and excitement of our family vacations!
