A no-nonsense introduction to the basics of photography, for anybody new to photography or those that are reviewing the foundational concepts
Getting into photography can be daunting for newcomers, but really it doesn’t have to be. That is why I created this two-part series to introduce you to the most important aspects. This should hopefully serve as a springboard to get you started on your journey, and also save you some time in doing your research.
Let's begin with gear before proceeding on to key concepts and terminology in Part 2.
IMPORTANT NOTE REGARDING GEAR
A lot of photographers will tell you, “Ah, don’t worry about gear! Gear doesn’t matter, the photographer does.” Well, no matter what they say, gear does matter, because even if you are an exceptional photographer, lower-quality gear is more difficult and inflexible to work with when attempting to achieve desirable image captures.
With that said, you don’t need the most expensive gear and you don’t need to constantly upgrade it. Technique, knowledge, and—most importantly—experience and time behind the camera are more important than the tools you use. Those tools matter, but practice with a used camera body and quality lens will get you further more quickly than two camera bodies and five lenses and occasional practice. For more information on searching for products with which you are unfamiliar, see our blog on How to Shop for Products in a Category You are Unfamiliar With.
Without further ado, here is a guide on camera gear.
CAMERAS
Between cameras and lenses, one ought to invest more money into lenses. In almost all cases, it is better to purchase an older model camera or even a used one, and use the savings to purchase a more expensive lens or two. The reasons for this are because [digital] camera bodies get outdated often and lose value quickly, while lenses hold their value over time fairly well, and most importantly: putting cheap lenses in front of your expensive camera is like putting smudged, plastic glasses lenses in front of your eyes. All things being equal, quality lenses will instantly make your photos look better (though it still takes knowledge, skill, and practice to take good photos).
As far as which camera manufacturer to buy from, it will depend on the type of work you like to do (photography, videography, combined, etc), but you can’t go wrong with Canon, Sony, and Nikon. These have great models for photography, and Canon and Sony are especially good for both photo and video. Others out there like Lumix and Fujifilm have their place, but are more niche than the first three.
Between digital mirrorless and DSLR, I’d recommend mirrorless, as this is essentially replacing the bulkier, slower, aging DLSR’s.
CAMERA KITS
When purchasing a camera, you will often see a kit where there is a camera body, lens, and potentially a bag, SDXC/SDHC card, and maybe other items. The latter accessories are of lesser consequence; what you ought to focus on is the camera body and lens. In almost all cases, if you want photos that are going to be noticeably better than those from your phone, you should avoid the kit lenses if at all possible. These lenses are typically zoom lenses that zoom in and out from 18-55mm or something similar, and apertures of f/3.5-5.6 (more explanation on lens focal length and aperture further on), and essentially what that means is they are cheaper and result in lackluster photos the majority of the time.
Instead, as mentioned previously, you should focus more on purchasing a quality lens and a decent camera body.
LENSES
What is a quality lens? Besides build and lens quality, the most important aspect that make a lens great is the aperture. The aperture serves the same purpose as your pupil in your eye—it opens and closes to allow more or less light in. This allows you to take better photos in lower light situations (indoor weddings, museums, evening events), and it also affects the depth of field, sharpness of the subject and blurriness of the background.
Any lens that is marked with a “fixed” f-stop (aperture) of f/2.8 and below (often f/1.4 and even f/1.2), is typically worth exploring. I personally ignore most anything that has a non-fixed f-stop of f/3.5-5.6, as those don’t let much light in, they change the exposure when you zoom in, and the quality, the sharpness, the color rendition, bokeh, and others are a major step down when compared to fixed apertures.
LENS TYPES & FOCAL LENGTH
Focal length is the zoom factor, or how far the lens is zoomed in or out. The approximate equivalent zoom for the human eye is between 50-70mm. Anything above that is a zoom magnification. Anything below that is a wide angle ("zoomed out").
There are two types of lenses: prime and zoom.
PRIME LENSES
These have no ability to zoom in or out. They are set at a fixed focal length, which means your feet are your zoom. Prime lenses typically provide the sharpest images, shallowest depth of field, prettiest bokeh, and handle lower-light conditions better than zoom lenses, are lighter, and have “character.” They are most favored by wedding, street, photojournalists, and portrait photographers and videographers, though they have a place in every photographer’s kit, even if a particular focal length is covered by a zoom lens. If you take a lot of family and pet photos, these are also amazing for capturing memorable moments.
Typical prime lens focal lengths are 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, 135mm, and beyond, but those above 135mm are cost-prohibitive for anybody besides niche professionals in sports, wildlife, and similar fields. My personal favorite and most-used focal lengths are 24mm, 35mm, and 85mm.
ZOOM LENSES
Zoom lenses do what their name indicates: zoom in and out. This does not mean necessarily that they are all about zooming in on your subject like a pair of binoculars or a telescope (those are called telephoto lenses), as they also do wide angle work. These are more general-purpose lenses, and are used by all photographers, but specifically sports, wildlife, landscape, and architecture photographers.
Common zoom lens focal lengths are 16-35mm, 24-70mm, 70-200mm. Additionally, there is 18-55mm and 24-105mm, but these are often the cheaper, lower quality zoom lenses I’d recommend avoiding.
Lens manufacturers: you can’t go wrong with purchasing a lens that matches the manufacturer of your camera (Canon lens for Canon, Sony lens for Sony, Nikon lens for Nikon, etc), but there are numerous third-party lenses that are worthwhile and will save you money while hardly compromising in any department. The standout third party manufacturer is Sigma and their ART series.
If there is one lens to start out with, some solid options to start off with are either a 35mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.4, or a 24-70mm f/2.8.
SD / SDHC / SDXC CARDS
Put simply, these are what your camera will be putting your captures on. Most everybody uses SDHC and SDXC cards,since they are newer iterations of the original SD cards. The minimum speed requirement you’ll be looking for is “Class 10.” As far as storage size, unless you are shooting a lot of video content, you likely won’t need anything greater than 64GB. For that, you’d likely want a minimum of 128GB (video files are much, much more data-intensive, of course), and in either the case of photography,videography, or both, you’ll want multiple cards in case one corrupts or gets lost or left behind (which is why for photography, you only would need between16GB and 64GB per card). SanDisk Extreme PRO is a good series of SDHC/SDXC cards to begin your research with.
PHOTO EDITING
Part two of this blog series briefly covers terminology for photo editing, but as far as “gear” goes, the professional software programs most photographers use are:
• Adobe Photoshop – Used for a wide range of photo manipulation, editing, and printing. The pros are that it is powerful and the options are endless. The con is that if you are editing photos in batches (like for weddings or sports photography), you’re really going to want to look at Lightroom or Capture One.
• Adobe Lightroom – As mentioned above, this is excellent for editing large numbers of photos and exporting them quickly. The editing capabilities are limited as far as heavy adjustments go, however. Lightroom also has “tethering” capabilities. A technique professional photographers (typically in studios) use to instantly see image captures on larger screens. Unfortunately, Lightroom is not so great at this, so that is where I would recommend Capture One.
• Capture One – Excellent for batch editing and tethering as mentioned earlier. Additionally, you can purchase it as a one-time fee rather than monthly like all Adobe products.
• Affinity Photo – Alternative to Photoshop that also allows you to purchase with a one-time fee.
For me personally, I use a combination of Photoshop, Lightroom, and Capture One. Photoshop because it is the most powerful and I work in photo compositing. Lightroom because when I batch edit, I already have a bunch of third-party presets I already purchased (again, covered more in Part 2 of this blog series) and I'm familiar with the program already. Capture One because its tethering capabilities are far superior to Lightroom, and I was able to purchase it once rather than pay monthly for it.
FILTERS
Filters have a variety of purposes, but most all will also serve an important function of protecting the front glass element of your lens. That is the sole purpose of the UV filters—lens glass protection. There are special effects filters like mist filters and star filters, but the two most essential ones worth considering at some point are polarizing and neutral density. Both of these are used by landscape photographers, but polarizers are used often by those that need to remove reflections from reflective surfaces like water, glass, and car body panels. Neutral density (ND) filters are for long exposure techniques during daylight (smooth waterfall photos), and for videographers and cinematographers who need to reduce incoming light in order to use wider apertures in brightly-lit areas.
TRIPODS & BIPODS
Tripods typically aren’t terribly essential for most photographers, unless you are shooting wildlife or landscape photography. For wildlife, they are essential because you’ll be using large lenses that will exhaust your arms in a hurry. For landscapes, they are good for “bracketing exposures”—a technique where you take three or more photos at different exposures and combine them to get more details in both the shadows on the ground and the sky. Also, tripods are useful for long exposures, either for astrophotography or for waterfalls.
Depending on if you're focused on photography vs video, you'll be choosing typically between a ball head and a fluid head or something similar. Often, similar to cameras and lenses, it is worth exploring purchasing the tripod legs and head separately, as the manufacturer may bundle a cheap head with decent legs, and your money might be better spent with those same legs, but a much better tripod head.
An excellent brand to begin researching and to benchmark others against would be Manfrotto. It's not the most expensive which is great, and you won't regret owning a Manfrotto vs a lot of other brands. Highly recommend. If you want to spend a ton of money, but have the best out there, go with Arca-Swiss.
Bipods aren’t used a ton unless you are mobile and with using a large lens. Typically, sports photography where you need to give your arms a break, but also be agile to keep up with the action.
Now that we’ve got all that covered, let’s proceed to Photography Basics Part 2: Key Concepts and Terminology.
