Buying a point and shoot compact camera

If a camera can fit in your pocket, chances are, it is a point and shoot. These cameras are great for a night out on the town, or anytime you want to take pictures, but don’t want to lug around a heavy camera. These cameras are generally the least expensive and range in price from under a hundred to around $400. Most point and shoots purchased in the last couple years take pretty great pictures. So, you are probably asking yourself, if these cameras are the smallest and lowest price, why don’t I just stop here, why do I need anything more?

Control, control, control! As we start to get into more advanced features of the camera, it becomes important to be able to change different ‘setting’ that the camera uses to capture the image. The two biggest ones are shutter speed and aperture (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are right now, I’ll be covering them in later entries).

If you look at the controls on the point and shoot cameras,

you’ll notice that they only have an auto setting and a couple pre-sets.


They don’t allow you to individually change the shutter speed or aperture. The camera relies on its internal computer and sensors to make a decision about how these things should be set. It usually gets pretty close, but you can’t do the fine-tuning that makes your images look really fantastic. There isn’t an image sensor or camera processor that can make decisions as well as the human eye… at least not yet.

Also, interchangeable lenses! The point and shoots come with one lens that is attached to the camera. That is the only lens that you will be able to use. If you want to shoot close up pictures, wide angle, or super zoomed pictures, you are out of luck. Point and shoot cameras do have the ability to zoom, and usually say something like “3x optical zoom”. This means that you can make an image 3 times larger. However, ever other camera uses a measure of mm to denote the camera’s zoom. A typical zoom range for a point and shot with “3.8x optical zoom“ is from 28-105mm, but that is hard to gauge, because they have different starting points to do 3x. I’ll get into more detail about what those numbers mean later, but they are useful for comparison.

Also, remember that DIGITAL ZOOM IS A SCAM!!! More on this tomorrow.

Personally, I have a point and shoot that I carry around with me when I want to take some snapshots. It’s a Canon SD850IS.

I bought it two years ago and carry it around when I don’t want to deal with the bigger cameras.


Examples: Canon SD970IS, Nikon Coolpix S230, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G3

Thanks to DPReview.com for the camera images above.

Buying a Digital Camera

If you are like me, then buying a digital camera is an overwhelming process. There are literally hundreds of cameras on the market and dozens of places to buy. Prices can range from under a hundred dollars to a several thousand. I’m not an expert on camera selection, but here is the thought process and learning I had when I selected my camera.

I’ve broken the digital camera market down into four “styles” of cameras:

1. Point and shoot compact cameras
2. Consumer model cameras with advanced settings
3. Consumer style D-SLR cameras
4. Pro level D-SLR’s

Each camera has a distinct purpose and situation that they are best suited for. The best advice I have is to choose the one that makes the most sense for your photographic needs, but that also fits in your budget. Buying the most expensive camera isn’t going to make you a better photographer. Knowing how to use the camera you have is what is most important. As the week goes on, I’ll create an entry for each segment of camera and walk you through the defining characteristics of each. I’ll also share what I bought, and why.

For now, a couple resources to check out are:

• DP Review (www.dpreview.com): Checkout the buying guide and camera database
• Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.org): Good for reliability and feature comparison, but the site charges to see everything
• CNet Digital Cameras (www.cnet.com): This link takes you to the digital camera section. There are a lot of good reviews here.

Just a note here, I’m exclusively talking about digital cameras. If you are interested in traditional film I don’t really have any advice for you.

www.jordanldavis.com is now live

Success!!! I was able to map the domain I bought and point my blogger account to that URL. www.jordanldavis.com is now live and running.

I'm starting this blog to chronicle my experience learning to become a photographer (or at least learn how to use my camera). I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to enroll in a photography course at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and wanted to share that knowledge with friends and families. I'll try to distill each lesson down and post it online so that others can benefit from what I'm learning. It will start out pretty basic with camera instructions, and hopefully get more and more advanced ans my knowledge and skills improve.

I'll also try to post samples of my work and share some of the feedback I get from class reviews. Please feel free to leave me comments, I'll try to reply to them.