Building Your Photography Kit

Building Your Photography Kit

An investment in great lenses will be your first big expense in building your photography kit – by Canon

Unless you’re fabulously wealthy, you’ll most likely be building your photography kit a little bit over time. At each step along the way you’ll want to add the components that are going to give you the most bang for the buck.
First Invest In Glass
You need a good camera, not a great one starting out. The first place you want to sink your important money is lenses. Glass does influence your camera choice to a certain extent as you’ll want to match your lenses to your sensor size.
Some lenses are built specifically for full-frame chips and others for APS-C, or crop sensor cameras. While there are some that perform equally well on either chip size, it’s more typical for photographers to sell the glass with the camera if they’re changing sensor sizes.
A Decent Tripod
Next will be a good quality tripod. You want one that’s lightweight and sturdy, but you don’t have to start out with an expensive set of carbon fiber sticks.
Along with the tripod you’ll want to invest in a remote trigger, preferably one that also functions as an interval timer.
A Good External Flash
How much you spend on this will be determined by whether you plan to shoot pictures for money or as a hobby; with the caveat that most professional photographers started out as hobbyists.
You can spend a lot of money on an external flash like a Canon 580 EXII, which is the top of the line when it comes to an external flash, or you can start out with something more mid-range, like this Sunpak. Personally, I’d save buying the really expensive kit until you can deduct it as a business expense.
Whatever external flash you start out with can always become a fill light later.
Wireless Flash Triggers
After the external flash, you’ll want to get a set of triggers so you can experiment with moving that flash off the hotshoe of the camera. If you want truly pro caliber wireless triggers, look at PocketWizard  or a less expensive set like these Pixel Kings.
Once you have your wireless triggers, then you can experiment with different types of flash umbrellas and softboxes.
While it’s easy to be envious of photographers with a car load of fancy equipment, keep in mind they didn’t buy all that at once. They invested a little bit at a time over the years.