Often clients or people new to the photography scene will ask me about the gear that it takes to be a photographer. My thoughts on Nikon that I use and what camera lenses that I like to use.
My camera is a Nikon D3000, and I love my camera! I have no complaints at all about it and it does all the jobs that I need it to do. And yes, I am aware that there are more expensive and newer cameras out there and I do plan to update sooner than later but I am happy with the one I have at the moment because I am living my dream as I use it for work and I couldn't ask for more!My camera is light weight and is easy to carry on me for any job. The Nikon D3000 features a 10.2 megapixel sensor, EXPEED processing system, 3-inch LCD screen, 3 fps continuous shooting and 11-point autofocus system. The Nikon D3000 camera is as well made as you'd expect a product bearing the Nikon logo.
My favorite lens is my 200mm lens, that is the lens that I use the most when I am shooting. I also love my new 300mm lens because it doesn't auto focus but instead I have to focus it manually which I like because I feel that a lot of times I get a better focus because I am able to focus the lens manually on exactly what I want it to focus on instead of like my other lenses that auto focus on what it thinks it should focus on. And when your a photographer like me who photographs nature a lot the auto focus can be tough because often times it's not focusing on exactly what you want and it can take several times adjusting the auto focus before you get the photograph that you were trying to get. I also have a 55mm lens that I use most times for up close portraits and I just recently bought the fish eye lens that I love to use in some of my nature photography and I also bought myself a 500mm lens as well that I have used on landscapes or on a subject that was far away that I wanted to capture.
I prefer natural light when I am doing a photo session but there is always those times that you must photograph indoors and create better lighting. And when that is the case I use a Polaroid PL-108AF Studio Series Digital Auto Focus / TTL Shoe Mount Flash. Because like my camera it is light weight I also like that it's so easy to just grab and attach and take only seconds to attach. Polaroid PL108 shoe mount flash is a Fully Automatic. This unit has a bounce flash head, red-eye reduction capabilities and a focus beam to assist in low light shooting conditions. With Auto Focus, TTL metering, automatic shutter speed settings, this flash allows a photographer to spend less time with flash settings. It is powered by two AA batteries and it also features a Tilt/Bounce head which provides Precise Light Control. I also have a lot of other accessories as well that I use for all different reasons.
I use lightroom 3.2 for my editing and photo enhancements. You used to have to use lightroom and photoshop but with the improvements to lightroom you really only need to use lightroom. When I first started photography I used to do a ton of editing, but now I just try to get my photographs as perfect as possible and enhance and edit slightly to make some photographs stand out more. To reality is that working with lightroom is a lot faster than working with photoshop, your able to edit and get through it a lot faster with lightroom.
The things that I have mentioned are the things that I use the most and are my favorite and every photographer has their own person preference on what works best for them. That is the beauty of photography, you can truly learn so much from other photographers because everyone works and uses things that are different. So my question is... what is your favorite piece of camera equipment that you can't live without?
