Beyond Point-and-Shoot

Foreword

From our earliest memories, my brothers, my sister, and I can picture our mother with a camera in her hands. Most of us developed an interest in photography from seeing all the photo albums my mom made. A case in point is my sister, Tammi, who had been shooting for years with a point-and-shoot camera and was achieving good results. She gradually became interested in portrait photography and found that her point-and-shoot camera just didn’t give her the quality she wanted.

One day Tammi called me and asked, “Darrell, I want to buy a better camera. What would you suggest?” I told her she needed a camera with a larger imaging sensor (the camera part that captures the light) to get rid of that grainy look she was seeing in her pictures. ...