Hello,

I am starting to look into buying a camera. I will be taking wildlife / landscape stills and videos. I would also like to take HD video. The videos I would like to shoot in the near future anyways are likely to be for the internet.

Not being versed in photography I am not sure if the new DSLR's are the way to go for me. I know alot of them now are shooting video as well as stills.

So the question I guess is, Is a DSLR what I am looking for, and what are a couple options that you could point me towards for me to start researching.

Also if you could throw in your two cents on lenses, filters etc. Again thinking wildlife close up and far off, landscapes especially waterfalls and winter scenes.

Some notes:

Budget $2000.00 ish
Adobe Premier PRO CS3
Photoshop CS3
well all of the CS3 products really...

Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter

The 60D is nice for wildlife. Get a long lens and shoot in crop mode and you're set.

Unfortunately, DSLRs are not as good for landscape videos due to aliasing. The exception is for timelapses. Timelapse video on a DSLR (shooting stills) yields amazing quality.

The real benefit for DSLRs is for shallow focus images of people. That's where they blow away traditional camcorders.

A 60D, a Tokina 11-17 (for timelapses), and a 200/2.8L for wildlife would be a great combo. I used to own a 70-300/4-5.6 IS, but the image quality doesn't compare to the 200L.

If you are starting you might look at something like sony's NEX line, large sensor video and photo camera's able to use the same set of lenses (including SLR lenses) sounds interesting enough to investigate, I think.

Canon 60D or the 600D if you are on a budget.

stelios

Thanks. This gives me a place t start looking anyways.

More suggestions or agreements with previous suggestions would still be appreciated.

Thanks,
Peter

Don't forget that you will need to encode to an intermediate codec or upgrade PPro CS5. CS3 doesn't natively recognize mpeg 4 based files which most DSLR's shoot from my understanding.

Canon DSLRs shoot H264 encoded .MOVs.

Panasonic tm900 or used tm700 have an intelligent zoom mode and shoot 1080p60. The panasonic gh2 dslr has a crop mode called ETC that gives you an additional 5x zoom factor on top of the 2x zoom factor you get from the micro four thirds sensor. All of these shoot avchd.

A cache feature may be important to you since it saves you rolling film while waiting for action.

If record time is an issue, be aware the Canon dslrs stop recording after 12 minutes in HD mode.

These are DSLR Nature Video I shot for our UWOL nature challenge on this site. This give you an idea what can be done with DSLR. You will suffer somewhat in fine detail, as compared to a high end video camera.


The Sandhill on Vimeo

Patterns In Green on Vimeo

An Odyssey Delayed on Vimeo

A Sony VG-10 hits all the marks for you. Big sensor, shallow depth of field, really high quaility video, great stills,an 18-200mm kit lens, and none of the downsides of DLSR video work. I've been shooting mine for 10 months now, and couldn't be happier. This camera has had more paying work than any that I have ever owned before.