Photography is something really great, especially to keep souvenirs and share them with your friends and family. This is available for everybody and so easy. You can do it at every level and do not necessary need to have professional camera.

Today, we are more talking about digital camera. They made a really good progress. I still remember when I bought my first digital camera, ten years ago. It was a 4M pixel and cost (with all accessories) the same price as the reflex camera I bought last year. This is amazing.

For me, there is an important think to remember when choosing a camera: this is not because you have a basic camera that you will take bad pictures, and this is not because you have a reflex that you will take nice pictures.

In photography, a big part is done by the photograph (you, behind the camera). It is important to know when to take a good picture and how to take it. You need to capture an emotion in your picture and this is not always easy... but you can do it with any kind of camera.

When buying a reflex, if your budget is limited, spend money on the lenses and not in the basic unit. The lenses are the most important part, this is where you can really improve the quality of the pictures.

Which material to buy?

My personal choice was to buy Canon equipments, but a lot of people are buying Nikon too. As I do not have any experience with Nikon, I will only talk about Canon.

When I bought my first digital camera, I bought a pack with:

• EOS 550D
• EF-S 18-55 f3.5-5.6 IS lens
• EF-S 55-250 f4-5.6 IS lens

This was a really good pack to start in the photography and see what my needs are. When reading numbers like this, you cannot really know what you need to buy, you do not really understand them. This is why this was interesting to buy this pack: do not spend too much money at the beginning, and test the difference between the lenses.

After this, I started to think about what I really needed and where I should spend money. Canon has 2 different levels of lenses: EF & EF-S. EF-S lenses are less expensive, because they cannot be mounted on full frame cameras. Only full frame cameras are using the border of the lens, EF-S lenses have then a really good quality for a lower price as we do not need to have a high quality of the picture on the entire lens (because we are not using the border).

My choice was then to buy an EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS USM. This is a really good lens and gave me the opportunity to improve the quality of my pictures. With a 2.8 lens, I was able to take good picture, even where the luminosity was not really great (like in caves), without using a flash.

What are IS & USM? IS means stabilized lens and USM is the "motor" that is used for the focus. This is less noisy and faster to make the focus than standard lenses.

My next choice was to buy a funny lens, a fish-eye. You can take really good pictures with a fish-eye, but you cannot take all your pictures with it. This is giving a certain effect to the picture, as you have a lot of distortion. As I didn't want to spend too much for this kind of lens, I found a really good one for a low price: Peleng 3.5/8A. This is a manual lens, but this is perfect for my needs.

After this, I decided to buy an EF 70-200 f4L IS USM lense. This is a very good, but expensive lense. I didn't know if I wanted to take the 2.8 lens, but the 2.8 is much more expensive and is twice the weight! The choice was really quick in this case... the biggest advantage of the 2.8 lens is for indoor pictures, but most of the time I am using this lens outdoor.

The next step was to by an additional device, a Canon EOS 7D. This device is still supporting EF-S lenses, but is more powerful and robust. I kept the old one, this is giving the opportunity to have one camera for my girlfriend and the second one for me. When traveling, we can also mount two different lenses.

When buying this camera, I also decided to buy an external flash: Speedlite 430EX II. This is a good one and can only be used as a slave (not as a master). In my case, it is enough because I can drive it from the EOS 7D.

Next lens will probably be the EF-S 10-22 f3.5-4.5 USM..

To resume:

It is important to choose the correct material for your needs, as it is often expensive and you cannot resell everything as you wish (for example, everybody wants to sell the lenses included in basic packs, but nobody want to buy them).

Improving the quality of your pictures and understand all details can take some time. I am not an expert, but I am trying to enjoy it. I always like taking my camera everywhere I am going and take a lot of pictures. One thing I hate is working on the pictures on my computer: All effects are usually done from the camera, when I am taking pictures. I do not like spending hours on my computer to work on every picture.

I will develop more in detail my personal experience about the different kind of material in the next articles.

I hope I gave you some interest to read the next articles talking about photography.

Enjoy your visit