My New Hobby AKA I Kanna the ShutterBug

Yes, I mentioned that the 90 size crash and stopping of R/C flight was actually a blessing in disguise...You see, I have always wanted a better camera than the two compacts that I have because it gets a little hard to produce sharp pictures with them especially when I am fixing my heli in the middle of the night in my not so well lit kitchen. For those who are wondering whats the link between kitchen and heli, basically I am very particular(or some call OCD-obsessive compulsive disorder) about keeping not scratching my flooring in other parts of the house, so the kitchen which has ceramic tiles becomes the place where I build and rebuild pretty much ALL my R/C.

The reason I want a DSLR is soley for the low light capability, basically high iso and larger aperture. It is perfectly possible to produce good pictures with a compact camera, but the problem with them is that in a dimly lit room, you need to increase the exposure time to keep the ISO(refer to 1. at the end of article) low for nice and clean photos. In normal situations, I can do handheld exposure of up to 1/3 second because the built-in stablisation of my compact is really quite good. However, building a heli in the middle of the night is not normal and most of the time, I am tired and my hands are sore, which all add to shaky hands and blur pictures.

And so with a little bit of budget, I set out to buy my first DSLR a month ago when my school holiday really started. I had originally wanted to get a Nikon D90 with a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. However, the Tamron was really slow in auto focus and the D90 did not come with micro-focus adjustment, which is used when your lens and camera body are not "in sync" with each other. What happens is that your camera body want to focus on the middle point, but the lens end up focusing on something a little in front or a little behind thereby causing a slight out-of-focus. It can be solved by calibration at the service center, but that would mean having to go down to the service center every time you get a new len. I didn't thought it was such a biggie until I tried a D90 at the shop and it was constantly back-focusing with both kit lens and the the Tamron.

That pushed me towards the canon 50D, which although had a nosier sensor, came with the AF-microadjustment function. I was certain I was going to buy it when I started playing with it and realise that it came with a jog-wheel and joystick EXACTLY LIKE HOW THE FUTABA 10C that I had. As for lens, I settled for the kit lens over the tamron because it focus faster and the image quality is not really that bad. Best of all, the price tag was smaller and it came with image stabilisation which the Tamron does not have. However, the Tamron will probably be great for low light because it has a larger aperture. Consider a larger aperture as a larger hole for light to go in, so obviously more light will enter in the same amount of time. So the difference between the Tamron and the canon 18-55 kit lens is that one came with stabilisation, one came with a bigger aperture(refer to 2. at end of article).So it was the 50D+18-55 kit lens.



Everything that came along with the kit, including memory card and bag.


Bulk of the cost, the Canon 50D body. It is suppose to be "semi-pro" camera body, but I feel that it is more of a hobbyist-consumer body.


Canon 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens attached. While it is really cheap and plasticky, the image quality really isn't that bad.


The jog-dial and joystick that is commonly found in futaba TX and on all the TX that I use/used.


The excitment and happiness of buying the camera was just like when I got my Trex 700N. Something that words cannot describe.
Here are some photos I took using the kit lens, nothing impressive, but good enough for my use. I thnk it is more of a issue with the user rather than the camera or lens.

Although the high iso is not as great as the nikon, some high ISO sample shots of my Ino-lab servos proved to be ok. Photographers might look a crop from the 100% photos, but how often will we really use that 15megapixels?

ISO200 Noise Reduction(NR) STD


ISO1600 NR STD


ISO3200 NR STD


ISO3200 NR HIGH


ISO6400 NR STD


ISO6400 NR HIGH


ISO12800 NR STD


ISO12800 NR HIGH


ISO3200 is perfectly usable for me and banding starts to appear at ISO6400. ISO12800 is really quite bad and not something that I will ever use.

In addition to the kit lens, I also got a canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens which to me is really sharp and really bright. Again, it is really cheap too, at just $130. I settled for these cheap lenses because of my limited budget and I really don't see the need for expensive lenses yet. I mean these lens are way more than sharp enough for me, just that they feel a little cheap and plastic. More about it another day...

1.For those who don't know, ISO is basically the light sensitivity of the sensor. When you have a higher ISO, the sensor in your digital camera can capture more light in the same amount of time than at lower ISO, therefore, higher ISO means that you can reduce your exposure time required for photos of proper brightness. However, as ISO increases, noise starts coming in and it can be observe in the form of those grains and coarse looking texture, especially in the shadow region. Therefore, we tend to try to keep the ISO low for shooting. As sensor size increases, the high ISO noise reduces, which is why most DSLR have better high ISO photos than compacts because of their much larger sensor. However, not all DSLR have the same sensor size, some are larger(and more expensive), some are smaller and equally expensive. Mine happens to be somewhere in between. In heli term it is like comparing a 90size(Large sensor), 50size(medium size sensor) and micro electrics(small size compact camera sensor) and it doesn't require a Ph.d to know which is nicer to use, although all can work great in the right hands- just not mine.

2. Stabilisation allows you to have longer exposure when taking photos, so more light can enter into the sensor. What the stabilisation does is to compensate for movement of the camera due to handshake when the camera is taking a photo.

A larger aperture on the other hand allows more light to enter in the same amount of time, so your camera spend less time trying to capture the image.

The main difference is that stabilisation minimize the effect of motion-blur created by the photographer, while a larger aperture and shorter exposure time will minimise motion-blur created due to movement of the subject in the photo. I.E. You want a big aperture for moving stuff like a flying heli in a cloudy overcast day, you want stabilisation for taking photo of a static heli in the same cloudy overcast day.