Photography?

I have an ok camera. At least, it was ok 4-5 years ago when I first got it. It has a 12x zoom, aperture priority, shutter priority, manual focus, up to 1600ISO, up to 2200x2something resolution. Everything I barely knew how to use at the time. At the time, everyone was jealous of me, and I thought I was the king of the camera-related world.

Now…the world has moved onto DSLR and I have a point’n’shoot with a big pointy zoom on it.

Since I’m planning on taking a bunch of pictures of models for this blog, I looked a bit into improving the quality of the photos I’m taking. A couple easy pieces of advice came out – lots of light, get a tripod, make sure you use a white background so the model stands out, use the highest aperture you can – great ideas, and very shortly I’m going to implement all of them, so that anyone reading this no longer has to look at the state of my painting desk when I take a photo :).

One piece of advice stood out though – buy a macro lens. Which, given the nature of my camera, would require me to purchase a DSLR with interchangeable lens.

You can purchase a DSLR for about $500 these days, which is about $4-600 cheaper (for the cheapest) than last time I looked at them. But do I really want a $500 DSLR? Am I buying crap? I’m not the kind of person who likes to buy crap, I tend to look at the “middle of the road” when it comes to purchases of this nature. But then you’re looking at $800+, and then getting more batteries and the right lenses and then you’ve spent $1000 on it.

I spent $1000 last month on buying a new engine part or two for my motorscooter. I use that 3-4 times a week. Before I started taking pictures for this blog, I used my camera twice a year, somes less. In the last few days I’ve pulled it out every day to take a picture of something on my desk (you just haven’t seen them all yet…).

So I think, for right now, I’m going to leave it at the less expensive pieces of advice. But maybe…if I end up with a couple hundred in gift cards for my birthday (coming up in a week and a half), maybe I’ll look a little more seriously.