Camera does matter

Remember when I said I had to take all of my photos with a cell phone camera?  Well, that nonsense is for the birds.

my little guy last week

Because of the unfavorable lighting in my beautiful old home, coordinating photo shoots of current projects, tutorials for the blog, plus materials for Etsy and Craftsy was getting really overwhelming and creatively draining.

You see, before even working on a project, I had to take into consideration Milo's schedule.  And whether it was going to be light enough outside to get good lighting inside during the time that I had to take photos.  And if it wasn't, I had to think about putting together a temporary alternate light source in the lightest spot in my house using bulbs, lamps, and a light box.

Then, even after all those issues {and the time it took to work on my project} were semi-figured out, I still had to spend countless hours editing the photos so they looked {halfway} decent.  

I finally threw in the towel in my fight against terrible lighting vs an insufficient camera, and decided to invest in a digital camera!

My new Nikon S8200 digital camera arrived on Friday and I immediately decided to take some phone-camera/new-camera comparison photos.  I selected the most unfavorable lighting conditions I could think of...night time with dim lighting, and morning with the curtains closed. 

Before I began, I made sure that the settings on both the phone camera and my new Nikon were set at default. I selected the darkest {dustiest} places in my dimmest room and got snap happy.   I put in very little effort into taking these photos, and didn't touch any of them up afterwards.  You know what I found out?

Camera does matter.

Taken in the corner near my window

The lighting isn't too bad on this one, but the Nikon definitely kicked butt on the quality

The Nikon actually made my broken lantern look really pretty

It was such a dark space that I could barely see the image on my phone camera as I snapped the photos.  The Nikon photos are still pretty dark and not as sharp as I would like.  A little practice and some adjustments to the settings should do the trick.

This is part of my vintage mug collection.  It was closest to the window, so the lighting is pretty good. 

Now that I know I can take decent photos in the least favorable lighting I have available, I am confident that I just lightened my work load.  I can't even imagine how great they're going to look when I do use additional lighting and exposure settings.

What kind of camera do you use?  Better question, what type of photo editing software do you like?