What’s wrong with my photo?

A beginner's guide to reviewing your images after your shoot and diagnosing what’s not quite right in the bad ones!

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So you’ve got your camera and you’ve chosen a lens, you’ve read my blog about the exposure triangle and you have taken some of the information from 10 Things I Wish I Knew as a Beginner Photographer, you’ve been out on your first shoot and now you’ve had a look at the images in your editing suite of choice.

You’ve managed to secure a few shots that you’re really happy with and you’ve got a few others that have got issues, they might be blurry or noisy or out of focus. You know there’s something that you should have done differently, but you’re not sure what changes you need to make.

We’re looking at some technical stuff in this one, some of which will be specific to your camera so you might want your camera and its instruction manual to hand when you’re reading this. An open YouTube tab might be handy as well.

This blog is going to aim to show you some common mistakes, what they look like and what you can do to stop it from happening again!

Blurry Images.

This image was taken at night, outside my old flat in London and it’s blurry. Really blurry.

There are different kinds of blur in photography, but the two we see most of in camera are motion blur (where the subject is moving) and camera movement (where the camera has moved as you take the shot).

This image hits the jackpot as it has both! The tree is blowing in the breeze and the camera has moved as I have taken the shot.

So what’s caused this?

There’s a couple of issues here, both related to the amount of light available. It’s a night shot, so lots of light needs to hit the sensor to properly expose the shot. To let enough light into the camera means the shutter needed to be open longer. In the case of this image, the exposure length was 0.5seconds which isn’t massively long, but certainly long enough to cause the issues that we can see.

This image was also taken hand held, i.e. not on a tripod and without a shutter release cable. When I pressed the shutter, the camera moved and in the 0.5 seconds the shutter was open, I also moved and as a result the camera moved even more. It was also a windy night, so in the same 0.5 seconds, the wind has blown the tree and this has been recorded as blur by the camera’s sensor.

As a general rule of thumb, if your shutter speed is longer than the focal length you are using, your camera should be on a tripod. So for example, if you are shooting at 50mm and to correctly expose the shot you need a shutter speed of (for example) 1/10 then you should be on a tripod.

There’s other things you could do as well that could be useful if you don’t have a tripod. You could try increasing the ISO - this would make your sensor more sensitive to the light, so you could reduce the shutter speed, but remember his could introduce noise to the image.

You could also try increasing the size of your aperture but remember, this could impact the sharpness of the image (lenses are usually sharpest towards the middle of their aperture size) and will have an impact on the depth of field of your image. This shot was taken at 50mm with a shutter speed of 1/50th of a second and an ISO of 100 - I could have increased the the ISO but it would have introduced too much noise into the image so the tripod would have been the best way to go here.

By contrast, the skyline shot above was a 30 second exposure, 15 times longer than the night image of the tree and the house, and the whole thing is pin sharp. It was shot at f/8 with an ISO of 100 at 70mm so the above rule regarding focal length and shutter speed comes into play here; this would have been impossible without a tripod!

Underexposed and Over Exposed Images.

The image on the left is one that we would use the phrase “blown out” to describe the sky. The shutter has been open for too long.

This means that when this image was taken, the shutter was open for so long that enough light hit the sensor to “overload” the photosites that it’s made from.

This means that effectively, no data has been stored in them, there is no detail there and the image shows a patch of complete white. No amount of editing is going to sort this out unless you replace the sky in Photoshop.

By contrast, the image on the right is under exposed, so the opposite is true. The shutter wasn’t open for long enough to let sufficient light into the camera to hit the sensor and so the photosites on this image are black, but this presents the same problem - there is no data present in those parts of the image.

Fortunately, the solution to under and over exposed images is simple and doesn’t require any extra kit to solve it (unless of course you are needing such a long exposure that you need to crack out the tripod). It pays to get this right in camera!

An over exposed image needs a shorter exposure time and an underexposed image needs a longer exposure time.

You should always check your exposure using the light meter which is built into your camera making sure it’s as close to the centre as possible.

You can also turn on the zebra stripes/similar in your camera. Check the manual to see how to do this, but the premise is simple, if you have over/underexposed areas of your image, the LCD screen will flash to show where the problem areas are. This a great way to see these areas at a glance and its really helpful when you’re starting out if you don’t know how to read your histogram or aren’t confident with the light meter.

But what about images that high dynamic range, and what is high dynamic range?

Images that have high dynamic range have really bright elements and really dark elements in them. You can often find these sorts of scenes at sunrise and sunset whilst the sun is rising/setting and parts of the scene are falling into darkness or haven’t been lit up in the morning light yet.

There is a way around this, and it’s called exposure bracketing. To do this, you need to take a correctly exposed image, an under exposed image and an over exposed image (you’re going to be exposing for the highlights, shadows and “midtones” in the respective images). Most cameras have this function built into them, and it will be called Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) and you should consult your manual to see how to do this with the model of camera that you have. Once you’ve got this set up, you can capture the images and then blend them in either photoshop or Lightroom to get yourself an image that is perfectly exposed! In most models, if you change the shooting mode to “burst” it will take all three images without you having to touch the camera and risk introducing any movement into the image.

Spots

More precisely, sensor spots! I have highlighted some of the ones in the image to the left although they’re already quite small and the size of this image isn’t helping, but they’re there! If you look closely, you will find even more.

These aren’t uncommon, especially if you’re changing lenses a lot and if you’re not changing them in a way that can help to prevent it.

The good thing is that they are easy to deal with using the clone stamp and/or spot removal tool in photoshop and/or the clone tool in Lightroom, depending on what you prefer. Both programmes will provide good results.

Whilst these are easy to get rid of, if there is a lot of them in your image then they can be time consuming and you always find more when you start to look for them. You might also find that they appear in some images and not in others, even though they were taken seconds apart. This is because the focal length you are using and the aperture size you are using can impact how many, if any at all, appear in your image.

These tiny, yet terribly irritating blemishes are caused by tiny dust particles settling on your camera’s image sensor and are easy to prevent and minimise if you do a couple of things . Firstly, never leave your camera without either a lens or or a body cap over the mount. This prevents the sensor being exposed to the open air and dust.

Secondly, whenever you are changing the lens on your camera try to have it pointed with the lens mount facing the floor. Dust tends to fall down and not up, so by doing this, you minimise the risk that you are exposing your sensor to. The more you change lenses, the easier this task will become as you build up some muscle memory.

You should also make sure that you keep your sensor clean. You can do this, or your can pay someone to do it for you. It’s not a difficult process, but it is a very delicate one and you’ll need a steady hand. If you’re not confident in your own ability to do this then most good, local camera shops will have a sensor cleaning service. You can buy packs of sensor cleaning swabs on Amazon and they are fairly cheap. I have linked the ones that I like to use here. You’ll pick a whole pack of these up for less than half the price of a sensor cleaning service in a shop but be warned that if you cause any damage to the sensor, you have set yourself up for a pricey repair and in extreme cases, you could completely write off your camera.

Always consult the manual for your camera and the manufacturers instructions for cleaning your sensor prior to having a go at doing it for your self.

Soft Images

Or, in the case of the image to the right, soft subjects.

When we talk about soft images, what we are talking about is an image which is out of focus. Or at least the subject of the image is out of focus or “soft”.

In the image of Chaffinch on the right is out of focus, or at least the subject is. What we have is an image where the camera has focussed on the wrong part of the image, you will see that the grass and debris in the back ground is much sharper!

The grass in the foreground is also out of focus, but in a shot like this (were the subject in focus!), could actually be desirable and help to draw the eye to the subject, but as we don't have the focus in the correct place, this is a moot point.

This image is unusable and unrecoverable. Were this the only shot of this bird I had, it may have been disappointing but fortunately, I managed to get one that was in focus!

Thankfully, again, this isn’t a difficult one to sort out, but the way in which you go about it is something which is going to be partially dependent on your camera brand and you’ll need to consult the manual, or YouTube to get the right settings.

You will need to familiarise yourself with the different autofocus modes in your camera, and make sure that you have the focussing indicators turned on so that you can see, through your viewfinder, or LCD screen exactly where the camera is focussing. This will help you in most cases to ensure that you are nailing the focus on the subject.

The autofocus in many newer cameras is powerful enough to detect the subject, recognise what type of subject it is and focus on it, if you have an older camera, you won’t have this luxury so you’re going to need to practice.

The image above was also shot at an aperture of f/4, which means that the depth of field is quite shallow, stopping down to f/8 might have help to save this image and given a deeper depth of field with more of it in focus, but this would have also mean slowing down the shutter to a speed which isn’t practical for shooting faster moving subjects.

If you’re shooting fast moving subjects like birds or sports, then you also might want to explore back button focus as this can make your life a bit easier - again, the way in which your camera is able to do this is going to depend on the make and model so consult the manual and consider watching some model specific videos on YouTube which will show you how to do this.

It can be slightly different in landscape photography and still life photography, or indeed any other genre where your subject is moving very slowly, or not moving at all, as you are likely to be using manual focus. The rubber duck above was shot in a studio using manual focus and a smaller aperture to give a greater depth of field.

Manual focus gives you complete control over where you focus and how you focus, within the limitations of your equipment and settings. When you have focussed your image, use the functions on your lCD to zoom in and check that you are completely pin sharp! You could also turn on focus peaking if your camera supports it as this will give you a further visual signal as to if/when your subject is in focus.

With any discussion about focus, we should remember that lenses have limitations. They have a minimum focus distance (how far away a subject should be before the lens is physically able to focus on it) so you’ll need to be in the right place to get the subject to be “focusable”. You’ll find this information printed on the lens you are using. You can also use the tools in PhotoPills to help you calculate hyper-focal distances. This can be quite complicated, so work on the basics first and then about going down this rabbit hole!

Grainy/Noisy Images

Sometimes, when you get your photos into Lightroom, you will be able to see that they have a kind of texture to them, almost like they have been printed on sandpaper.

What we’re dealing with here is digital noise, which is introduced into images when the ISO setting is cranked up, this amplifies something called “photon shot noise”in your image which leads to the grainy feel that you can see in the grass in the image on the right hand side.

This is one of the easiest things in this list to sort out, you just need to know your camera and be familiar with how well it deals with high iso. For example, on my Canon 80D, I know that I can get the ISO up to around 6400 before the grain starts to become an issue, but this varies from camera to camera, there is no hard and fast rule. You will need to do some experimenting to find out where the red line for you is and how much grain you are willing to accept in your images.

Remember that if you reduce your ISO, you will need to adjust shutter speed and/or aperture to compensate for this. If you are working at higher ISO’s then you really need to nail the exposure in the camera, as if you try increasing the exposure too much in Lightroom you’re really going to exacerbate any noise in your image and could end up with something that is unusable.

The other way that you can deal with some noise is in post production. The latest version of Lightroom has a noise reduction function built into it and this is pretty good at removing noise, but the trade off is that you can end up with images that look a but un-natural if you use it too much or if there was a tremendous amount of noise in the image to begin with. Other tools which can do this are available, but you need to be aware of the same issue and you should check the cost of these bits of software too!

To wrap up, understanding and avoiding common photography pitfalls is all part of the journey to improving your craft. With a bit of practice and attention to detail, these issues become easier to spot—and even easier to fix. As with most things, it comes with practice, and sometimes a lot of patience.

If you’ve found this guide helpful or have any questions about your own photography challenges, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to drop me an email, or connect with me on Instagram and Facebook for more tips, inspiration, and behind-the-scenes content. Happy shooting!

10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Photography.

Beginner Photography Tips from Someone Who’s Been There

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I have been working on a lot of things for beginner photographers in the last few weeks and a few people have had a read of my blog from last week, Essential Photography Gear for Beginners: What You Really Need to Get Started. https://chriskendrickphoto.co.uk/blog/what-gear-do-you-need-as-a-beginner-photographer

To this end, I thought I would go one further and think more about beginner photography and this led me to think about the things I wish I knew when I started taking photos. 

This turned into quite a long list (with some repetition!), which I have tried to distil into ten points below. I will try and keep it short and simple, but I do have habit of trying to share as much as possible - it’s all about helping each other. I’m not a gate keeper! 

So let’s jump into 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Photography…

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1. You Don’t Need an Expensive Camera to Take Great Photos

This one kind of touches on the “Does Gear Matter Question”. The answer to that, as we know, is yes. But also a resounding no. But, it does a bit and “categorically no”. 

Ultimately, what matters is that you have some gear AND you know how to use it. Some of the best time you can spend as a photographer  is time getting to know your camera (or the camera app on your phone!), what the buttons do, and more importantly, where they are. You will miss shots if you’re spending ages trying to remember what the buttons do and where they are. Its also well worth learning your menus, where to find things and what they all do.

But this doesn’t answer the question. The main point in the previous paragraph is “that you have some gear”. It doesn’t matter what that gear is, as long as it works and you know what you’re doing with it.

You can take a great photo on any camera. It doesn’t matter whether its a Hasselblad X2D or an Canon R5 MKII. Breson didn’t have either of these. Gilden doesn’t use one. What they do know how to do is to frame a shot, when to take the shot and how to edit the shot to make it exactly what they want. 

If you have camera that uses older tech, or you have a camera that is more basic, or you’re using your phone, you can take a great photo. 

Good photos mean something. Good photos say something. Good photos tell a story. You achieve a photo that does all of these things with any camera, be that the latest offering from one of the big companies, or a 20 year old DSLR. What matters is what or who you are taking photos of. 

This is one of the most important things I have learned. When I started out, I bought the best camera I could afford and paired it with a kit lens. I still have that camera now. I have added more lenses, but I still have that camera and use it most days. 

Another way to think about this. In “real life” I am a teacher and I have taught photography at A-Level. The best photography student I ever had, the one who took the best images was the student who had the cheapest camera (not just in their class, but across all 4 classes I taught) and they created some images that were genuinely first rate images. I always remind myself of this when I am looking longingly through the window of my local camera shop. 

2. Manual Mode Isn’t as Complicated as It Seems

It really isn’t. It might seem it, but it’s not. I promise. The thing you need to master is the exposure triangle. Conveniently, I have made a blog about the exposure triangle, which you can read here. https://chriskendrickphoto.co.uk/blog/a-beginner-photographers-guide-to-the-exposure-triangle

If you can master the basics of shutter speed, ISO and aperture. Get the hang of this, then you can start to think about white balance and picture profiles (if your camera supports them) and maybe go one step further and start to explore things like long exposure photography and ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). 

You should also look into aperture and shutter priority on your camera and learn to use these too.

3. Light Is the Most Important Part of Any Photo

It’s the name of what we do… The word “Photography” is taken from two Ancient Greek words “Photos” meaning light and “graphé” meaning to draw or write. Photography literally means “writing or drawing with light”. 

So yeah, light is kind of important! Without it, we can’t take images. 

But then we have low light, good light, bad light, soft light, hard light, specular light… and many more. 

A good space for us to start is Golden Hour. This is the light we have after sunrise and before sunset. The term  Golden is a bit of a misnomer, it can be about an hour, it can be 15 minutes and it’s also really dependent on the weather and atmospheric conditions where you are taking photos. If you’re covered in thick grey cloud, you aren’t going to get amazing golden light, but you will have some lovely soft light to work with.

It doesn’t have to be soft light though. Hard shadows can work really well and add drama to your photos, just look at the work of someone like Fan Ho, for example. He used harsh shadows to great effect in a lot of his work (he also shot on a dual lens reflex camera, not a mirrorless or a DSLR, because they hadn’t even been thought of at this point!) 

As you get more confident with your camera, you will find new ways to manipulate the light with long exposure and exposure stacking and this will produce you some awesome results!

Use your weather apps and maybe look at experimenting with apps like PhotoPills. They will help you to decide what the weather might be like at the location you are visiting and will tell you where the sun is going to be in the sky and this will enable you to pick the right place to make the most of the light. 

I’m going to include reflections in here as well, because they’re made of light too, right? Reflections are some of my favourite things to include in my shots; I used to live for a good reflection when I lived in the city, and the same is true now I live out in the sticks, they just tend to be a bit bigger in the countryside that in the city. But you don’t need a tarn in the Lake District with the reflection of a mountain, a puddle and tree can work just as well!

4. Composition Can Instantly Improve Your Photos

This is one of the most important things and one of the easiest ways to improve your images, quickly and cheaply. 

Composition as both a topic and a concept is HUGE. As a beginner, I didn’t know much about it, let alone the different types of composition. When I started out, I was just taking pictures of things I liked and sticking them in the middle of my frame. 

Then I learned about the rule of thirds, leading lines and the golden ratio. There’s more than this, but these are the three that you will hear the most about. You should go and find out about them and start using them - the difference you will see is huge. 

5. Editing Helps — But Subtlety Is Key

Editing is one of my favourite things to do. You need to know that it takes practice and you are constantly learning. You can never know everything about editing. 

When you first start out, one thing you are likely to do (I know I certainly did!) is to find the saturation, virbance and clarity sliders in Lightroom and drag them all or most of the way towards the right hand send. This will make your colours unnatural and it’s not a desirable look for your photos. 

Take your time, practice, look at other photorgapher’s work, watch YouTube videos to learn, but keep it subtle and let it look natural. 

When it comes to editing, less is more. Just like this section of the blog!

6. You’ll Take a Lot of Bad Photos — and That’s Fine

Time for clichés. 

We learn by making mistakes, so go out and make them. The only stupid mistakes you make are the ones that you don’t learn from (2 clichés already!).

But joking  (and clichés ) aside, embrace your mistakes, establish why it’s a mistake and then go out and try again. Rinse and repeat.  

(I’ve used stock images in this blog, but this one is mine, it was handheld and the exposure was too long for this method of taking the image, so it’s blurry and there’s camera movement!)

7. Stop Comparing Yourself to Everyone Else

“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken” Oscar Wilde. 

This was on the wall in a school I used to work in and it’s stuck with me. It works for so many things in life, but in this instance, it works really well. 

Don’t sit and compare your landscape shots to Ansell Adams’ work. Don’t compare your portraits to Annie Leibowitz and don’t compare your still like/commercial photos to Scott Choucino. These are well established professional photographers, have years of experience and have forgotten more about photography than most of us will ever know!

But aside from those I have mentioned above, don’t compare yourself to other photographers on social media. You’re not them and they are not you. Work on your own images and discover your own style!

8. Consistent Practice Beats Occasional Perfection

Use it or lose it. If you’ve ever played and instrument, you will know that you need to practise to get better. Stop practicing and it takes longer to learn the piece. If you’re a sports player and don’t train, you lose the skills you are developing and your fitness decreases and you don’t perform as well.

The same is true with photography. If I go out to shoot and haven’t done so for a couple of weeks, I really notice it and I find that it takes a while to get my eye in and I don’t always know where the camera controls are - this leads to missed shots and missed shot can’t be a good shot or a bad shot!

9. You’ll Start Noticing the World Differently

This sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but it’s true. You’ll notice leading lines, you will notice good light and you will notice that you don’t always have your camera with you when you wish you had - but we all have a camera in our pocket these days anyway, don’t we?

I have lost count of the number of times I have been driving home and have seen amazing light on the fells. The number of times I wish I had my camera with me or the the numbers of times I wished I wasn’t driving at 70mph watching the world zip by the car window is huge. 

If you look hard enough, everything can be a photo and as you practice more, you will begin to see that you can find images where you might not have thought there could be one. Even in harsh sunlight (which isn’t always the photographer’s friend), you will see that you start to see shadows that will make a great image!

10. Enjoy the Process

What is the point in doing it if you don’t enjoy it? It’s probably going to be difficult at times, but what you experience in difficulty, you will more than make up for in sense of achievement. 

Go out there and take lots of bad photos! Learn from the mistakes and use them to improve. Enjoy getting frustrated at the edits but having something beautiful at the end of it. 

I’d also recommend getting your photos printed. I print my own images but if I’m not printing them to hang on the wall or want smaller images, I use services such as Free Prints and get a stack of 6x4s delivered direct to the door for about three quid! It completes the process and brings everything full circle from scouting to shooting to editing, to having those prints in your hand - it’s nice to have a tangible reward at the end!

Photography is great fun, if at times it can be challenging and occasionally frustrating. It can be your best friend and your sanctuary, and it can also, at times, be your worst enemy and some subjects will become your nemesis, but it wouldn’t be fun if it were easy, right?

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Thanks for sticking with me through this post — I hope it’s helped you feel a little more confident on your photography journey. If it has, why not stay connected? You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook for regular tips, behind-the-scenes content, and new work. And if you’d like more beginner-friendly photography advice, early access to blog posts, and exclusive updates, make sure to sign up for my newsletter here. Let’s keep learning and creating together!

5 Quick (and free) Tips to Boost Your Photography

Nothing techy, nothing expensive, just 5 things that you can do today!

1: Shoot what you love and what you enjoy.

Don’t be a slave to social media and shoot what you think everyone else wants you to photograph. Photography should be something that you do because YOU enjoy it; i really believe that if you’re shooting what you enjoy, somewhere you enjoy doing it, then you will take better images because you will have more of a connection with your subject matter. It might be wildlife, it might be landscapes, it might be street, it might be commercial but it should be what you enjoy! I manage to combine my love of being outside with my photography, so I get the best of both worlds!

2: Look at the work of other photographers. 

Read photobooks, look on the internet, soak it all up! You don’t have to copy everyone else’s work but it's useful to have inspiration and to see how other people compose images.

If you can avoid all of the other distractions, then using the internet to do this is a great idea, but know what you want to find and then go find it!

Some of my favourites are Nigel Danson, James Popsys, Scott Choucino (these three have really active social media and YouTube channels and I have learned a TON from them!), Galen Rowell and of course, the master: Ansell Adams.

These aren’t the only photographers out there, so find ones that you like and learn about their photography!

3: Talk to other photographers!

This is where I have learned more than via any other medium, other than actually going out and shooting. And let’s be honest, if you’re talking with other photographers, you’re probably out shooting anyway! Talking to other photographers and shooting with them is one of the best ways to learn, to get better and to develop your skills.

4. Be Present. 

By this, I don’t just mean be there and be ready to get the shot. I mean be present in the moment, be aware of what is going on. Put your phone away, take the AirPods out, look and listen. Doing this meant that one a recent trip to a local viewpoint, I got to see things in the night sky that I haven’t seen before and it was really special. Allow of your senses to play a part in what you’re doing. Nothing beats being out early morning listening to the birds and watching the world come to life in front of you and capturing it with your camera.

5. Get out and shoot!

Make a plan and stick to it. Go out without a plan. But go out! 

Some of my best shoots have been spontaneous, some have been the planned shoots, but they all involved getting off my behind and going out and doing the thing that I love. New years day last year was a really special one - I was up early and took advantage of the empty streets (I was still living in London) and saw one of the best sunrises I saw in all of my time in London. It was a great start to the year!

Bonus Tip!

Take lots of photos - I see so many people who have gone out and taken 10 photos on the same photo walks where people have taken 300. It pays to have shots in the bank, because the more you take, the more chance you have having something different or something interesting. Taking fewer photos because you “know how to get the shot” doesn’t make you a better photographer, it means that you get shots that other people miss. 

Bonus Tip 2!

Know your camera. It should be like an extension of your body. READ THE MANUAL! Watch YouTube videos about your camera and find out everything it can do and then learn how to do it. There is nothing worse than seeing something amazing happening in front of and then having to faff about with your camera to dial in the settings meaning that you miss the shot. Even during the longest of golden hours, the good light can be there and gone in a minute (or even seconds!) and you don’t want to spend that time staring at your camera wondering why you can’t make it do what you want it to. Oh, and make sure that you’re shooting in raw so that you have the flexibility when you’re doing your post processing!

Keep Creating!

Chris

Does Photography Gear Matter ?

Welcome to my first blog! It’s a cold, sunny, Sunday morning here in Cumbria so I’ve made a brew and sat down to try and answer the question “Does photography gear matter?”. This a question that will have ten’s of thousands of answers out there on the wider internet, and I’m going to share my thoughts here.

Where to start?

There are thousands of camera options available to you, just as many lens options, there’s all of the different filter and tripod options and don’t even get me started on bags (this is a separate blog all on its own!).

I get asked a lot “what’s the best camera?” or “what’s the best lens for portrait/landscape/street?”. The best answer I have heard to these questions and the one I like the best is “the one you already have”. Even if that’s the one that you have on your phone. Phone cameras are getting better by the day, and some of them even shoot raw images, which give you more flexibility when you’re editing.

But what if you don’t already own any camera gear and want to move away from your phone, where should you start, what should you get and where should you buy it from?

In truth, if you have a budget of, for example, £1000 (about $1200US), then you should (in my opinion) look to spend about half of this on your camera and lens combination. Why? Because if it breaks or you break it, it gets full of water or some other unthinkable thing happens to it then you have enough in the bank to be able to replace it. So the best camera is the one that you have and the one that you can afford to replace. I’ll talk about your first lens later.

Buying you first camera and lens is only the beginning. Once you have made this purchase, you’ll need to think about what sort of photography you’re going to do and the conditions that you’re going to be shooting in. If it’s anything that’s likely to be in low light situations, then you’ll need a tripod if you’re going to get sharp images, free of camera movement, which you can be proud of.

Then you’re going to need to be able to move it all so a decent, comfortable camera bag will be essential. So out of our remaining £500, we’ve probably just spent another £50-75!

But what about your lens? This is an important decision. The quality of your glass is important and is probably one of the things that will have the biggest impact of the quality and feel of your images (vintage lenses create some great looks, when you’re ready to dive down that rabbit hole). Most consumer DSLR/mirroless cameras can be supplied with a “kit” lens. These are usually cheaper than premium lenses, but won’t be weatherproof, so be careful if you’re using it in the rain. Kit lenses are generally zoom lenses, which is great when you are just starting out as it means you’ve got a range of focal lengths covered so you can experiment, be flexible and have fun with your images. The Canon 18-55mm f/4.5-5.6 is a common kit lens that you can buy with their cameras. Just be sure the check that the lens is included in the price that you pay, as a general rule, DSLR/Mirrorless cameras don’t come supplied with a lens and you’ll have to buy this separately.

New or Secondhand?

This is a question that is likely to be dictated by your budget, but you also get a lot more bang for your buck if you are willing to make a second hand purchase. The secondhand camera market is huge and there are some bargains to be had if you know where to look. The best places to start this search are websites like MPB and Wex.

Both of these sellers are reputable UK brands who supply the kit with a warranty and everything is thoroughly checked before it goes on their websites, so you can be sure you’re not throwing money away and buying a dud.

3 of the lenses in my current set-up were bought secondhand and haven’t caused me a single problem and have proven to be great value for money.

You can also consider places such as Facebook marketplace and eBay, but make sure that you do your research and don’t get either ripped off or scammed!

There is also a large “grey market” for cameras. I won’t post any links here, but I am sure you will be able to do a quick Google search and make up your own mind. With regard to the grey market for cameras, you’ll get an authorised product but outside of the manufacturers authorised distribution channels. So you might buy a lens from a UK based seller, but the product wasn’t intended for the UK or European markets, meaning you don’t get any of the manufacturers warranty protection if something goes wrong.

Will people take me seriously?

Don’t worry about what other people think. Use what works for you; the most important thing is that you ‘get on’ with your setup. That being said, if you get booked to photograph a wedding and turn up with an iPhone and nothing else, you’re going to get some funny looks!

“Is this a professional camera?”, another question that gets asked repeatedly and one that doesn’t have a really well defined answer. Any camera can be a professional camera if you’re using it to make money. What portion of your income you need to be making to be considered professional is another discussion for another time! Also worth noting at this juncture, if you’re out shooting and you end up on private land (such as Canary Wharf in London or the area around Tower Bridge), you’ll probably told by a security guard that any camera that has an interchangeable lens is a professional camera so that they can make you stop and move you on (always be polite and do what they ask, it makes it easier for everyone else who has to encounter them in the future); luckily, you’ll probably have another camera in your pocket anyway.

So, does gear matter?

Yes.

And no.

And also maybe. To some extent.

If you’re reading this and you have made it this far, chances are you’ve read a few articles on this topic and heard a number of different opinions.

If you have a camera on your phone and you’re happy with it then great! If you want some more flexibility in what you do then you may want to consider your first DLSR/mirrorless purchase.

Gear matters if you let it matter. Going out and buying a Canon R5 with an L series lens is going to set you back in excess of £6500 and isn’t going to make you a better photographer, no matter what your experience level. It will create lovely files with lots of data that will be great to edit, but they won’t necessarily be “good photos”. If you’re spending this kind of money on your first camera because “it will encourage me to go out and shoot” then the chances are that in 6 months time you’re going to have a very expensive ornament sat on your shelf! Remember the old adage that photography happens in the space between the photographer’s ears.

The resolution/megapixel count on newer cameras is huge, which is great if you’re drastically cropping images and want to retain the image quality. But bear in mind, that if you’re after the resolution, then consider the Canon 5DS or 5DSR. Both of these have more megapixels (50.3MP) than the R5 and are now about 8 years old so can be found for about £5000 less than the newer cameras.

What matters most is that you’ve got a setup that works for you and that you can use easily, confidently and that allows you to be out there making photos. You can’t make images if you don’t get out to take them!