APS-C cameras: why a crop-sensor body is your new best friend

In this tutorial, professional travel and landscape photographer David Clapp explains why photographers shouldn’t overlook the potential that APS-C cameras offer for taking great image.

Many photographers will remember the days when the first APS-C cameras became available on the market. I personally remember their arrival at the start of my photographic journey, when film photography began to dwindle.

I stood there lusting after the new Canon EOS 10D in my local camera shop in a state of confusion, but after just a few years of shooting my beloved an EOS 5 film camera, I still couldn’t make the move.

Both of these 35mm film cameras could be regarded as ‘full frame’ and the idea of selling up and downgrading systems to a 24mm sensor was still unappealing.

The reason? Initially it was wide-angle lenses, an essential tool for landscape photographers. Swapping to an APS-C sensor meant cropping my beloved 17mm focal length to a rather unexciting 27mm.

The only way to get around this was to go even wider – the 10-22mm EF-S gives 16mm on a crop sensor at the wide end, so you could say this was ‘problem solved’, but if I had purchased the underpowered 6.3mp 10D on that day, all my lovely lenses with their specific focal lengths, would become awkward focal lengths (24-70mm = 38-112mm, 70-200mm = 112-320mm).

So I resisted until 2006 when I could afford the landmark full frame 12mp Canon EOS 5D and kept my lens line up.

Subsequently, if you entered the world of photography through a different door at the same time I did, with an interest in wildlife photography let’s say, then your experience would have been entirely different.

Wildlife photographers embraced digital cameras and the crop sensor. A 500mm lens becomes an incredible 800mm monster, giving extra ‘reach’ at equivalent megapixels, so let us examine another landmark camera, the Canon 7D.

This is the camera that changed everything for wildlife photographers. It was an affordable 1.6x crop sensor that gave a wonderful 18mp resolution with a whopping 8 frames a second.

Was it a great quality camera? Well it suffered from excessive noise issues at lower ISO’s (even at ISO 400) and it is this reason that everyone will remember giving immortal advice to their crop sensor friends about ‘moving to full frame’, which offered greater quality potential.

So the point of this tutorial – APS-C cameras suffered from quality issues, as those 24mm sensors packed in far too many pixels at a stage when sensor design was still developing. Those days are now long gone and my message is simple – the quality is there and a crop sensor camera is a very useful tool in the camera kit.

SEE MORE
Camera sensor sizes explained: what you need to know about Four Thirds, 1/1.7, full-frame and APS-C format

Why you Need Crop Sensor Camera

There is incredible potential in shooting crop sensor cameras alongside full frame cameras and lenses. It’s something that many of us overlook, especially in the world of landscape and scenic photography. Here’s why APS-C format is worth your time:

1. Depth of Field
The focal multiplier of 1.6x means a lens will be an equivalent composition on a full frame camera will require a much wider focal length on an APS-C. Let us return to my wide angle analogy – a 28mm focal length on a full frame camera sees the same composition as of 17mm on an APS-C.

Using a 17mm lens means there is a far greater depth of field available, so even though the image appears the same, there is a huge difference in the depth of field. The aperture f11 at 17mm has a huge DOF increase over f11 at 28mm.

SEE MORE: What is depth of field in photography? How aperture, focal length and focus control sharpness

Look at this lighthouse image – it was taken on a Canon EOS M3 using an 11-22mm lens at 11mm. The available depth of field at 11mm is so huge that I could photograph the interior from just a few feet in front of the lens to the top, some 70m upwards at f8!

The only way to get this image in focus with a full frame camera was to shoot at 17mm f/22, a massive benefit for the following reasons –

1.   There is much more available light at f8, so my shutter speeds are far quicker.
2.   I can therefore handhold – the full frame camera’s shutter speeds would drop significantly and a tripod would be essential.
3.   At f22 the full frame camera would hit diffraction, losing contrast and sharpness.

As it happens, tripods were not permitted in this building due to tight staircases, so a unanimous vote for the APS-C camera over the full frame.

SEE MORE: A layman’s guide to depth of field: how to check and affect sharpness like a pro

Here’s another similar example – the EOS M3 required a focal length of 110mm at f11 to get this sunflowers shot sharp front to back. The same composition required 176mm on full frame and even at f22 it was impossible to get front to back sharpness. Again a win for the APS-C, this time with a long lens.

2. No Loss of Quality – Better ISO perfomance
Noisey cameras at lower ISO’s used to mean big problems for crop sensors. Without getting too techy, the pixel pitch of a full frame is approximately 10 microns whereas a crop sensor is around 4 microns. This used to cause excessive noise at lower ISO’s but now the quality of most modern crop sensors has improved so much that the ISO limit has raised significantly beyond the ISO400 days of the Canon EOS 7D to ISO1600, even on consumer cameras.

SEE MORE: 6 things you don’t know about ISO, but probably should

3. Even more Megapixels
Most APS-C sensors are hitting the 20mp stratosphere, some are orbiting way beyond. The Canon EOS M3 I have referred to in this article is 24mp, that’s more pixels than any DSLR I own. The impressive sensor means I am shooting DSLR quality without compromise whatsoever. Exciting times indeed.

4. Camera Size and Weight
Many APS-C cameras are incredibly light. Entry level cameras like the Canon EOS 1200D are tiny in comparison but produce wonderful 18mp images. Referring back to the M3 once more, the whole system of lenses, ranging from 11-200mm (that’s 18-320mm full frame equivalent) weighs in at just 1.2kg! It also has an adapter you can use to attach it to any full frame camera lenses. Can you see the advantages?

5. Handholding Potential
The last point is to do with handholding your camera. Have you ever heard of the ‘1/focal length’ rule? When handholding a shot your shutter speed should be 1/focal length to stop camera shake and from softening our image.

So if we take out APS-C 17mm and Full Frame 28mm comparison, the shutter speed required to take exactly the same composition on both cameras is 1/17th sec and 1/28thsec respectively.

This means the APS-C can be handheld at far slower shutter speeds, almost twice as slow! If you add image stabilisation into the equation, the APS-C camera can handheld at shutter speeds reaching a 1/4sec without loss of sharpness. My personal record is 1/2sec, impossible with a full frame equivalent.

SEE MORE: Best camera settings for shooting handheld

I will leave you with this shot, which was impossible to take with a full frame camera. It required a focal length of well over 400mm, around 480mm to be exact. I used the M3 attached to a 70-300mm lens @ 300mm. Without this 24mp camera I would have been cropping heavily into a 20mp 6D, losing resolution and unable to frame the image at all.

In my experiences as a landscape and travel photographer I am now left wondering what shots I have missed without the versatility of the APS-C sensor in my camera bag. The entry level crop sensor camera is not looking like such a beginner camera after all is it.

Now the quality has rounded the corner, there is no reason why a crop sensor camera should not be included in yours too. Do not consider it a backup body; it’s as primary as a full frame and can do nothing but extend your creativity and quality even further.

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