THE CAMERA

Planning a vacation by car or a ride through the country or a train ride through the mountains? You can capture the beautiful and the unexpected, the color and the brightness of life and nature with a few photography basics.
Roadside Photography can be fun and rewarding as well as educational. For those who are relatively new to photography, traveling along the highways of America as well as many other countries expose us to wildlife, fields of flowers, flowing rivers and streams and a variety of lighting situations that can give a single subject a variety of looks.

THE CAMERA
First let’s consider the type of camera. We will exclude film cameras even though in many schools film cameras are taught in courses on photography. But unless you are making photography a profession I will only address the two main cameras that most are buying today those being the “point and shoot” or the “DSLR” (Digital Single Lens Reflex).

Often times the main feature touted by manufacturers is the number of megapixels a camera has. The word “Pixel” is short for Picture Element which is nothing more than an electronic dot that captures light. The importance of this is relative to the kind of image you want to produce with your camera. When traveling the roads, there will be times when you will stop to shoot objects along the roadside that are relatively close to the road such as flowers. Most point and shoot cameras will give a high quality picture that can be enlarged to 8 x 10 with little or no pixilation. Pixilation is when after enlarging an image the pixels become visible to the naked eye. But for objects that are at a distance such as birds and other wild life a point and shoot may leave something to be desired.

I had that experience when first learning to use a digital camera. I was on a cruise to Alaska using a Kodak Easy Share with a 10x zoom lens and shot a picture of a beautiful bald eagle sitting on a tree limb on the side of a mountain from the deck of the ship. As a 5 x 7 image it was a fairly good shot, but when enlarging it to an 8 x 10 the image became grainy. Very disheartening to say the least

The main point here is to be aware of the limitations of the point and shoot. Because the sensor in a point and shoot camera is smaller than that of a DSLR the ability to capture light is diminished.
On the other hand a DSLR, although becoming cheaper as time goes on, will cost you several hundred to one thousand dollars or more than a point and shoot, But, your ability to shoot a greater variety of images under a wider set of conditions, circumstances and distances is greatly improved
When shooting images from the roadside or any other situation, the basic idea is to be aware of what you want as an end result. So many think because they purchase a point and shoot that has 10 or 12 megapixels the image is going to be that of one who does photography with a DSLR. Not so! A TIP: Do your homework.