Essentials you need in your starter photography kit

Our quick guide to building a starter photography kit shows you all the key essentials you need to get to grips with your new hobby.

Whether you’re feeling inspired to take some great photos to print, display, or give as homemade gifts, stick these items on your shopping list and you’ll be ready to go!

Camera (obviously)

When it comes to choosing a camera, we recommend a digital single-lens reflex camera, or DSLR as they’re commonly known. DSLR’s are modern and versatile, allowing you to switch up the lens whenever you like – plus it means you’re working digitally, so you can take thousands of snaps and edit them later on in your editing suite.

Lens

It may feel tempting to just use the lens which came free with your camera purchase, however, we recommend choosing a specific lens for your starter photography kit. Photographers recommend the nifty fifty for beginners, which is a lens that captures a scene very closely to the way you see it with your eyes. There’s more technical stuff to it, but as a starting point, that’s all you need to know.

Lens protection

It’s important to protect your kit, and with lenses being one of the more expensive and necessary pieces of gear, you want to make sure you protect it. Purchase a UV filter in the same size as your lens and keep it on the lens at all times so you don’t get any scratches.

Grey Card

Once you get to a location you need to check that your camera is set to portray tones accurately; you do this by setting the white balance on your DSLR. Buy yourself a photographer’s grey card to help you and you can make sure your snaps come out near-perfect!

Tripod

A tripod is an essential part of your beginner photography toolkit. A good tripod has adjustable legs and a level; it holds your camera steady and at the angle you want. A tripod isn’t necessary for every photographic opportunity, but it sure helps in most cases!

Batteries and charger

Always make sure you take spare fully-charged batteries on a shoot; you don’t want to be caught short!

Memory cards

You’ll be storing your photographs on a memory card, so again, make sure you have spare so you can keep taking photos as long as you want to. There’s nothing worse than stumbling upon some inspiration only to find you’ve run out of storage space.

Off-camera storage

Once the shoot is finished it’s time to back up your work. You can do this by downloading your images onto a hard-drive or on the cloud.

Editing software

Two firm favourites for editing your photos are Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, which you can download onto your computer. You can spend hours on these tools tinkering around and getting your snaps print-ready.

Print services

A good value printing option is to send your edited images off to a professional printing service (like us), who can deliver your images in any format you like.

We hope that’s taken some of the mystery out of your first steps into taking fabulous images; now you can write out your shopping list for your starter photography kit – we can’t wait to see your photos!