It seems like more and more people are considering buying a DSLR, which is great to hear so many people are interested in getting more serious about their photography! I’ve been received a lot of DSLR related questions lately, so I thought I would blog about your photography questions in this post.

1.) What kind of camera should I buy?

Wow this is a hard question because it’s like asking what type of car you should buy. It’s really about personal preference and how much you’re willing to pay for certain features. There are two main manufacturers: Nikon and Canon. You can’t go wrong with either brand. The consumer cameras start at around $450, and the high-end professional cameras can set you back $6500. The basic consumer cameras are designed for beginners ($450-$800), and the controls are set up like a point-and-shoot camera, with pre-programmed settings. If you want fast control over manual settings like aperture and shutter speed, then the prosumer cameras ($800-$2000) may be right for you. They are a blend between the consumer and professional cameras, and the higher end prosumer cameras have better autofocus and are weathersealed. Anything about $2000 is reaching into professional camera territory, which is probably way more camera than you need for your first DSLR.

2.) Is the kit lens sufficient?

The trap that a lot of people fall into is that they think that the kit lens that comes with the camera will be sufficient. So they do extensive research and buy the most expensive camera they can afford, but don’t have any money left for lenses. Little do they realize that the kit lens is for general purpose photography, and to get amazing pictures, they will have to invest in more glass. When they finally start researching lenses, they are surprised to find that the really nice lenses costs more than their camera. Yikes! What to buy? If you are on a tight budget, at a minimum you should buy the 50mm 1.8 prime lens, which is usually around $100. This is a fixed lens, which means you won’t be able to zoom in and out, so you’ll have to do a lot of zooming with your feet to compose your shot. Another option is to buy used lenses, but inspect them carefully and try them out on your camera before buying.

3. Can you teach me how to use my camera?

First of all, I encourage everyone to first read their camera manual. Yes, the booklet that came with the camera that you ditched after page 10. If you can’t get through it, try reading 1-2 pages a day, and if you find it hard to understand, consider buying a third party manual like the Digital Field Guides or Magic Lantern Guides. They are usually easier to read through. If you still have a lot of questions after that, I’d be happy to help you out, but I know Nikons much better than Canon systems. If you don’t live in the Boston area, we can meet up next time I’m in your neck of the woods.

4. What kind of post-processing software should I buy?

This really depends on how serious you are about editing your photos. Once I found Lightroom, I’ve never looked back. It’s one of the best programs for managing your pictures and if you want more control over post-processing your photos. My favorite part is batch editing, where I make some changes to one image and then apply it to an entire set of images. It saves a ton of time if you are editing several hundred images from a photo shoot! I use Photoshop occasionally when I have to do some serious editing, but I find that Lightroom has most of the Photoshop features that I need. These programs are expensive and will set you back quite a bit. I’ve read that Photoshop Elements has 90% of the most used Photoshop features, and is also much, much cheaper, so Photoshop Elements should be sufficient for most photographers. I don’t know of any cheap alternatives to Lightroom sorry. Aperture (for Mac only) is slightly cheaper, but I didn’t like it as much as Lightroom.

This is my longest post ever, so thank you for reading! I hope this was helpful to some of you. If you have a question I didn’t answer, please post it in the comments section, and I’ll run another Q&A post if there’s interest!

Since this post wouldn’t be complete without pictures, here are some pictures of me [not pictured] making wontons taken with my 50mm 1.4 lens. The first picture is a snapshot of my assembly line: 1.) spoon the meat mixture on the wonton skins first; 2.) use a large brush to wet the ends of the wonton wrappers (if you have a wide enough brush, you can wet two wonton wrappers if you lay then side by side); 3.) fold them into triangles; 4.) bring the ends of the triangles together to form a Chinese gold ingot.