Photography
Photography does not have to be a scary or daunting hobby, but it does help to know a little before you get started.
Prime vs Zoom
This is an age old debate, what is better? a prime lens or a zoom lens. If you have played with both, the best answer to give is something along of the lines of this. If you know what focal length you want to shoot at, or are doing studio work. Prime is the way to go. It will be “faster” and far lighter a lens to carry. That said, if you don’t know the focal length, or will be shooting things moving around, zoom is the way to go.
That said, if you are brand new to this hobby, I highly suggest starting with a zoom lens. Something with an aperture of 2.8 or better (lower number) with a focal length of 24 to 70. This may not be perfect, but it will give you and idea of where you want to shoot.
Macro? Telephoto? Wide Lens?
How and what you want to shoot. This one is going to be very personal, and you wont “know” until you “know”. If you don’t know, and trust me, you wont. I’d highly suggest renting a few different lenses. Aperturent is my go to for rentals. Play around with different shooting styles and focal lengths and you will quickly find what you like to take photos of. You may be a little gun shy of a $200 rental, but trust me, $200 for something you didn’t enjoy stings a lot less than $2,000.
I find myself enjoying wild life shots the most. Which means I am either really far away (telephoto) or really close up (macro). I didn’t realize I would like either until I started shooting bugs and humming birds.
Photo Editing
“We can fix that in post” is something you might hear from time to time. Yes, a little touching up can make all the difference in the world. Most photo editing tools now a days have an AI driving way of editing photos. I would highly suggesting learning manual before you us AI. Yes, for the most part AI will get you 80% of the way there, but is can and will over expose your photos.
There are many a tools to edit photos, for the time being Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Cloud seem to be the top dogs.
Automatic? Manual? Or Priority
When you are are just getting started, I would not worry too much about this one. Eventually you will go full manual, you will learn what to tweak and when to do so. But when starting out, I would tell you stick with priority modes. Aperture mode when you are shooting something in low light, shutter mode when you are shooting something fast.
Smaller the aperture number, the more light you get, the longer the exposure will take. Faster the shutter, the less light you get, the shorter time the exposure will take.
Yes you can play with ISO and exposure, but let’s stick with learning what you like to shoot and how you want to shoot before we get too far into the details.
