Quote:
Originally posted by bauhaus
Without the flexibility of lenses and a good flash....photo quality will always look like amateur shoots....add in 8grand worth of studio lights and you will be sure to take the best pics possible.
Tim
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You know I wouldn't even totally agree with you if you were shooting for a variety of non-web applications, but shooting for the web, you do NOT need studio lighting. I shoot almost totally with a mix of fill and bounce flash (all from the camera), and window light whenever I can get it. Maybe you'd like to accuse my customers of being morons, but I get webmasters of very important sites coming back to buy from me over and over again. These would include Amateur & Teen Kingdom and Karups Private Collection, among others. My camera and lighting fits in a relatively small camera bag. I think a lot of photographers are equipment collectors, which is swell if that's how you want to spend your money.
However, with a mid-range digital camera like the Olympus C-3000 (which has a zoom lens, not interchangeable ones) and about $400 in accessories, you can take very marketable photos. For example, this is the kind of result I get using bounce and fill, and I didn't choose it because it's above average. It's fairly typical of what I can do with this kind of lighting:
One has to bear in mind that a lot of the incremental increases in "quality" (and even that word I have reservations about) are lost when the result is published on the web. If you are shooting for print media, that is a totally different world than the web, and this is not the forum to be discussing which camera to buy.