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Peter Bhat Harkins
Sample Camera Pictures
If you’re researching which camera to buy, you’re probably frustrated by trying to find sample pictures. Google hasn’t dealt well with spam on expensive products like cameras, so you’ll see a lot of splogs and shops hosting the same handful of example pictures from the manufacturer.
The non-spam review sites might have more, but they also have professional photographers taking the pictures. (And if they’re not professional, someone who reviews dozens of cameras is going to take better pictures than you.) It doesn’t help answer the important question, “If I buy this camera, what will my pictures look like?”
The solution is the Flickr Camera Finder. When you take a picture, the camera embeds metadata that includes the brand and model. With tens of millions of photos, Flickr has samples from ordinary people using every kind of camera. (If you’re considering a camera that is not yet released, read the manufacturer’s and professional reviewer’s sites to find out about the sensor other internal technology; most new cameras are pretty close cousins to previous models.)
When you bring up Flickr’s page for the specific camera you’re interested in, search for the kinds of photos you’ll be taking. I knew I’d be taking lots of indoor shots of my friends and medium-range snaps of interesting things I see in daily city life, so I searched terms like “party”, “basement”, “couch”, “hanging out” for the former and “graffiti”, “bus”, “intersection”, “storefront” for the latter. I was able to avoid two cameras that I thought were great but turned out to be fairly poor for my needs.
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