Photography Gear: Getting Started
So you’ve decided that you wanted to get into some type of photography, be it fine art, landscape, portrait, families or whatever. Well there are two really important parts to great photography, you’re vision of what you want your work to be and the gear you use to make that vision a photograph. But here is the thing, your vision is free but the gear is expensive it’s the yin and yang of photography. So this is going to be a series of articles about the getting the gear you need. I’m want to help you get started with good stuff and avoid some cheap gear landmines that are out there. Just a warning up front, this whole series is going to be pretty Nikon gear heavy. Now Canon guys don’t get upset with me, I just don’t know Canon’s gear or model numbers and I grew up around Nikon so I speak it, Canon guys help me fill in what I leave out.
Anyway, getting started in any kind of photography you need to have a camera. Unfortunately me or anyone else can’t just tell you want camera to buy. You have to decide on your own how much is to much, what brand you want and features you have to have and what you can leave out. No matter what, go dSRL or digital single reflex lens, they are more expensive but you have a lot more upgrade options and flexibility. The biggest thing is you can change lens so you aren’t just stuck with what lens is attached to the camera, permanently.
If you are starting at zero the best place to start is with a dSLR kit and that is the first big question you have to answer, how much to you want to spend? A lot of people really get caught up around the idea of not having the gear they need, don’t. Personally I think that if you have any extra money to spend you should spend it on the camera and lens. Lens are a whole other topic, but my plan of attack as always been not to cut corners with the camera body or lens.
If you’re on a budget or have a set amount to spend, look at used dSLR kits. You can get a lot of bang for you buck by finding some really nice lightly used cameras on eBay and photo supply sites. Looking at new Nikon kits, I personally would start looking at the D90 kit then decide if you want to spend more from there. Nothing is worst then finding out 6 months after you bought a camera that you could have spent a couple hundred more dollars and got something/features you really needed.
The couple things to look for. ISO or a camera performance in low light is a huge plus and is one of the biggest reasons you really need to go to a place that sells cameras to look how the camera performs. You really should go look at cameras in person just to get a feel for how they function. Another thing is look at if there are any add on features or extra you want and make sure the camera you are eying will work with those extra items.
Unfortunately this is the one subject I can’t just say this is what you need because there are just to many choices for camera kits and this is going to be one of the biggest upfront costs of anything photography. If I were to recommend something to start with it would be the Nikon D700, but your into about $2,000 just for the body.
Why the D700? The biggest thing it’s an FX sensor camera and $2,000 less then the D3. In Nikon cameras there are DX and FX cameras, every camera but the D700 and D3 are DX sensors. DX sensor add a 1.5 times zoom or any lens that isn’t a DX lens, meaning that a non-DX 100mm lens would really be a 150mm lens on a DX camera body. An FX camera is full frame meaning there is no built in zoom so 100mm lens is 100mm end of story. As you’ll find out almost all of the really great lens are not DX lens. Also the D700 as great low light or ISO and every feature you could ever want or need.
Design Resource Links: March 5
Having great resources always makes life as a designer a lot easier. This isn’t the best way to do this, still working on figuring out a better way to present this, but here are a list of links that I’ve found every useful over the last week. There are things from font and icons to textures. Since my design work is mainly focused... (Read More)
WordPress Plugin: IntenseDebate
About a year ago I first found about about IntenseDebate. For those that don’t know Intense Debate is comment plug for most blogging platforms that adds extra functionality to blogs comment systems. When I first heard about it the the biggest feature was thread reply comments, since WordPress at that time didn’t offer threaded... (Read More)
- New blog post: Photography Gear: Getting Started http://bit.ly/9ZMGCZ
- @ericharlan next year, next year. Everyone is disapointed about not making it up there.
- Looks like the waitress at Blonde did enter the right tip I gave her, glad she didn't get stiffed by entering the wrong amount.
- RT @KirstenD2: Facebook and Twitter see triple digit growth in mobile visitors http://bit.ly/9ExTTu
- Long weekend and I wasn't ready for 7 am this morning, think I'm going to limp through the morning maybe the whole day.











