Erik Akers

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.