This year I bought my first good digital camera, a Nikon D300. I bought it in April and paid about $1800 for it. You can get it for $1200 now. I think I am correct in calling it a semi professional camera. It's not a professional camera, but I considered it expensive for me. I picked the Nikon because I had previous experience with Nikon and I thought the learning curve would be easier with the same brand. It probably made no difference because I have so much to learn. The other choice would have been Canon, but in terms of what I've read about quality, they are comparable with fans of each declaring for their favorite. The other deciding factor was the list of cameras Getty Images finds acceptable, because I wanted to have my photos represented by Getty if possible. Yes, that's a stretch for an amateur photographer, but I don't put limits on myself. I expect to reach the goal eventually. The cheapest Nikon that Getty would accept images from the day I checked was the D300.
I started searching for information about lenses. I found it difficult to learn which lenses to buy. I checked Amazon.com where they have lots of reviews, but very few professional photographers offer reviews on Amazon and it's hard to tell if the review is sound when you're reading the raves of an amateur. Ditto on the Adorama site. I then found the Ken Rockwell site, and I was influenced by Ken to buy the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 G ED lens. I like the lens, but I regret buying it because I find I need to get to 300 or 400 mm, I'd have liked a faster lens better, and mainly because the photos I take with it are not as sharp as I'd like them to be. I don't blame Ken. It would have been wise for me to rent the lens first and see how I liked it. It's also been a decent lens, versatile in that it comes close to a macro, and it has taken photos that have been approved by 6 stock companies.
I bought a good book on photography for beginners by Bryan Peterson entitled Understanding Exposure which taught me the basics in a very easy to understand way. I'm grateful for the book. I checked out his field classes on one of his websites and noticed he requires that you have a "wide-angle to telephoto zoom or prime lenses, macro lens (or extension tubes)", so I decided that a wide-angle lens was a basic requirement for learning photography and I started to look for one. After a lot of searching online I decided on the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 ED AF-S Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom lens. It cost roughly $1650. It's a great lens and I've taken my best photos with it. The only other things I've purchased have been a SLIK tripod, a polarizing filter, and an 8GB flash card that I paid about $170 for including tax at Best Buy. I have used 5 GB in one shooting session so far, usually I use more like 3. I think I'd have done better buying a couple 4GB flash cards. It would be easier to download a smaller number of files at once and I wouldn't be putting all my eggs in one basket in case this flash card fails one day. It would also have been cheaper. Oh well.
My goal right off was to get my images accepted at Getty Images. But I chickened out and went to istockphoto instead. I'm still working on acceptance there and learning as I go. The great thing is that istock is owned by the same company that owns Getty and they are a gateway to Getty. It makes sense to me to begin there since I don't know photography very well. I've had 2 photos accepted there and I'm working on number 3. You can see the 2 accepted images here. www.laylandmasuda.com/ediesistockacceptedimages.html
I've also discovered that you can think you're sending a perfectly acceptable photo, but the way you save a photo in Photoshop can ruin the photo so that you're not sending what you were just looking at. My rejections are almost always due to noise. A few times it's been really confusing to me because I know the image I sent didn't have a noise problem. I was emailing a photographer friend of a friend of mine, Geraint Smith www.geraintsmith.com about this and he asked me to send him the rejected photos. As I was sending one of them I saw it was full of noise. I realized something must have happened when I saved the image, because it sure didn't look like this before. Or I may have sharpened the image at less that 100% view and sent it without a final review. It's turning out to be a lot of work to learn the ins and outs of submitting an acceptable photo. I'm currently taking an online course on Photoshop CS3 at lynda.com from Chris Orwig. I am really enjoying it. He's a photography teacher at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California and you can tell he is a very experienced teacher. Here's a link to his Photoshop website.
I recommend the lynda.com software learning site. (They have no courses on photography.) I have learned a lot there having taken roughly 25 courses from them. Some of the teachers are better than others. I'll be honest, a few aren't very good. Chris Orwig is outstanding. I pay a $25 a month fee to lynda.com and I have access to all their online video clip courses 24/7. It's the cheapest most convenient way to learn software I know.
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