John Sessoms wrote:
But that got me thinking overnight & I decided to submit a more general question to the group wisdom. Given a new photographer who already has a "pro-sumer" DSLR, what advice would you give him/her regarding BASIC kit? ... after I suggest a good, solid tripod.
Spend as little as they can on gear for the first year with the understanding that almost everything they get in that first year will become their "emergency backup kit". Most people won't still be doing photography regularly after three or four months, and most people won't do it seriously enough that the going from budget to high end kit will make any difference in the technical quality of their photos. I tell people to just start off with a used camera off of craigslist.
For tripods, start off with benro/induro gear, but go straight to arca-swiss rather than manfrotto mounts. The top end induro ball head is less expensive than bottom end of the name brands and has a 3" ball rather than a 1".
While you're at it, get a monopod. I like my five section benro carbon fiber because I can carry it in my camera bag. When you are hiking around, you can carry a monopod with ball head in a maglight holster on your belt. It's much easier than carrying a tripod, and can get you a lot of the performance.
It'll take him a year to find out what lenses he really needs. He should go with what he has until he finds shots that he regularly cannot get without a wider, or faster, or autofocus lens. In the mean time, rent or borrow lenses.
Buy a copy of light, science and magic, and read it twice. On the second time through it, do at least some of the exercises.
Shoot raw, if he wants he can start with raw+jpeg and not process the raw files, but doing your own post processing of raw files probably makes several stops of performance difference (in challenging light), which is the equivalent to a much more expensive computer.
-- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
