When I started painting, I always worked from life. A couple of years ago I realized that working from life, although it is a great way to work, severely restricted the types of poses I could paint. I wanted to paint movement — crowds of people, skateboarders in mid-air, dancers, and revelers. I bought a point and shoot camera. It worked well enough, but it had some drawbacks. Maybe it was a blessing when Lucy ate my camera because the old camera gave me a chance to learn what to look for in a camera for reference photographs.

SLR or Point and Shoot?

Camera snobs will tell you that you need an SLR, but I’m not convinced. An SLR is not going to magically give you a better reference photo. You can get the exposure wrong on an SLR just as much as with a point and shoot. Depth of field doesn’t make much difference because your photo is not a final product; you can always blur parts of your painting. Megapixels don’t matter; anything over about 3 megapixels is fine for a reference photo. Zoom range doesn’t matter either; some compact point and shoots have the equivalent zoom range of a 300mm SLR lens.

Here are the real advantages of an SLR:

• Speed – Even after you depress the shutter halfway to autofocus, a point and shoot camera has a delay of about 1/3 of a second between the time you press the shutter and when the camera takes the picture. With an SLR, the shutter delay is imperceptible. If you are shooting a still life or a landscape, this delay doesn’t matter. If you are photographing a crowd or a person in motion, however, 1/3 of a second is an eternity. It’s long enough for someone’s head or hand to appear between you and your subject, and it’s long enough for a fast-moving subject to completely disappear from the frame.
• Control over Lighting – If you are willing to use an external flash that is mounted off-camera, then an SLR can give you more control over lighting your subject. If you are working indoors, you should avoid using your camera’s built in flash or an external flash mounted on the camera because the direct light eliminates all the shadows and flattens the form. In a figure drawing session, you never want to sit next to the main light; in photography, you never want the main light source to be on your camera. (It’s okay to use on-camera flash in the sun because the sun will be brighter than the flash.)
• Lenses – An SLR also gives you more lens choices, which can be important for certain subjects and styles of painting. One of my favorite watercolorists, John Salminen, uses a telephoto lens to get a spatial compression that is essential to his design. Similarly, a fast, fixed lens will allow you to get pictures in low light situations without a flash. If you want to take reference photos of people in dimly lit restaurants and bars, you need a much faster lens than you can get with a point and shoot camera.

A point and shoot camera gives you one enormous advantage: portability. You can’t take a good picture unless you have your camera with you. You can put a point and shoot camera in your pocket or your purse, and it’s always there when you need it.

What Did I Eventually Buy?

I couldn’t make up my mind, and I bought two cameras: a point and shoot and an SLR. I keep the point and shoot, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5S, with me all the time. I use the SLR, a Nikon D60, when I am on an expedition to take reference photos. I use the SLR when I know that that I am going to be shooting in less than optimum circumstances such as fast moving subjects or low light.