Marvel Arts

Realdoll picture of Taryn as a card shark from CharlieJoanne.com:

You can do fairly well with a cheap fixed lens camera these days. Pixel counts are high and they are easy to use. Film based cameras are all but obsolete except for a few specialized cases outside the adult content arena. If you’re shopping for a new one consider looking at the DSLRs.

DSLR means Digital Single Lens Reflex. In layman’s terms it means it’s a digital camera, not film, and SLR indicates that there exists a mirror inside the body of the camera so that when you look through the viewfinder, you are actually looking through the lens itself. The framing of the shot and zoom factor of what you see is what you get. These cameras are most likely to sync properly with studio flash. Separate flash heads and power packs are essential for achieving professional quality photos indoors. Flash I will discuss in separate threads. Lighting is a subject you can easily spend a career learning.

So, for the camera, if you are contemplating a DSLR, be sure the lens is removable and interchangeable. This will allow you to expand as your photography skills grow without reinvesting into another camera body.

Typical brands include Nikon, Canon, Minolta and Fuji. Once you pick a brand, stick with it. The lens mounts, conversion software and file formats for raw images are not easily, if at all, interchangeable. Lenses are especially particular to a camera body mount type. For instance, Nikon uses an F-mount to attach the lens to the body, Pentax a K-mount, etc. Why don’t they all manufacture the same type connector? Because it’s not just the physical connection, but also the signals passed from the camera to the lens and vice versa that make focus, exposure and all the features of the unit operate.

My personal recommendation is either a Canon or Nikon. The lens availability is high and varied while the software tools for post processing your images is very well supported, even with specialized tools to help with particular effects like skin softening, sharpening and tonal control.

At Marvel arts we use mostly Nikon (with an older Fuji DSLR we had great results from in the early days) for still cameras and Canon for video. If we had to do it all over again, we’d still select Nikon for the stills and probably Panasonic for the video. Video aside for the moment, the models in Nikon I prefer are the D-70, D-100, D-80, D-200, D2X.

Shots produced for the Charlie Joanne and Struts paysites these days are done with D2X. The older material on Charlie’s site was Fuji at the beginning, then D-100 and D-70.

It may not prove wise to go for the D2X right away if you’re not at the top of your photo skills game. The extra benefits it provides like pre-filtering the color space and high resolution may cause more picture problems than the other model if you don’t know how to effectively control lighting, tonal range and white balance.

So now you know what we use here to produce pictures like the one shown above. Camera selection, although important, certainly isn’t the only key in getting a great photo. I’ll write additional articles covering lighting, post processing in Photoshop and various other tips to make better pictures.