I would love to start taking good quality photos of all the beautiful birds in my garden so, would like to buy a camera. Can anyone recommend a good quality (not mega expensive) camera that can take photos up to 10 meters away? Thank you! :)
This may help you...
The lens is probably the most important thing you need to think about and it is not always easy to compare between the likes of a DSLR and a Bridge camera. Bridge cameras often quote the multiplier (eg "An 80x Zoom"). This doesn't really help, as that multiplier is simply the difference between the shortest and longest focal length. eg an 80x zoom may be 10mm to 800mm, or 20mm to 1600mm. Lenses for DSLRs etc are always quoted in mm though - so to compare and work out what you need, always look in the fine print to see what the "Full Frame Equivalent" is. Full Frame (FF) is simply a sensor the same size as old 35mm film. For birds at 10m, you're going to want something of 400mm or longer ideally - this is shot at ~10m with a 400mm lens on a FF body as an example/benchmark
The feeder's a typical one, it'll help you gauge the image size.
This is then the result of me cropping out the Sparrow from that image
Anything shorter than 400mm equivalent is going to make it harder to get a nice image cropped from the picture (unless you get closer of course). Longer lenses in many ways are better (and some Bridge cameras give you silly focal length equivalents of 2000mm), but they will also be poor light gatherers, giving noisier images, so there's always a bit of a trade-off
I'm always hesitant about giving advice on choosing cameras but I'm inclined to agree with Alan that a bridge camera may be the way to go in your situation. That way you haven't spent a fortune if you decide photography is not for you or if you eventually get the bug and want to upgrade to DSLR's for example. That's how I got started.
Just to give you an example I dug out my old Canon Powershot SX50 (now obsolete) and took a photo of a Red Kite perched about 50 metres away. It was just handheld and rather windy and here's the image straight out of camera.
And here's the same image after cropping and a bit of tweaking.
OK it's not going to win any prizes but it's still fairly usable.
Have a look at the Panasonic Lumix range of bridge cameras also the Canon Powershot range. Sony and Nikon do similar cameras but I'm not familiar with them. Best advice I can give is go to a reputable camera shop and talk through your requirements with them perhaps having done a bit of research first.
The lens on the Canon SX50 is equivalent to 24mm to 1200mm thus 50x zoom. The photo was taken on maximum zoom ie 1200 mm equivalent. At this zoom range it will not let as much light in and when there was some cloud cover some of my shots were quite grainy. like this one.
I didn't mess with the settings so I could have done better. I'm not sure what the size of the sensor is in this camera but it's much smaller than a DSLR so you won't get such good images particularly in low light.
In case you were wondering they are called bridge cameras because they bridge the gap between the simple point and shoot pocket sized cameras and the DSLR's.
Choosing a first camera is a bit of a mine field so I wish you luck.