Photography Beginner? This Is the Minimum Gear You'll Want

Are you new to photography? Are you feeling overwhelmed with the thousands of gear options available to you? If so, you should watch this.

In this extremely helpful beginners video, Benjamin Jaworskyj does a great job breaking down the basics for your first photography gear purchases. Personally, when I was first starting out, I was so confused as to the "correct" gear to buy. I knew I wanted to photograph landscapes, but also wanted room to grow and expand into other genres. I pored over countless "what's in my camera bag" YouTube videos to get an idea of what other photographers were using. Maybe I could learn from them. But nope, just more questions. What body was good for me? The right lens? One-strap or two-strap bag? Ball-head tripod or a different option? The choices are endless.

One particular thing Jaworskyj mentions that I thought was a great tidbit to add is an image-editing program. I strictly shot in JPEG for the first one to three years of my passion until I realized shooting in raw and using some sort of post-processing program is the way to go. I wish I understood this much sooner as there are a bunch of images I enjoyed from my first years that I can't edit the way I want to now. Jaworskyj mentions there are multiple free ways to do this, but I've never been let down with Adobe's Creative Cloud. 

One thing Jaworskyj mentions that I personally don't agree with when buying camera gear regards batteries. The photographer mentions that any third party battery is just as good and cheaper as the brand's version. I don't entirely agree with this. From my experience, I've had no luck using third-party batteries. They either die a lot faster than my Nikon batteries or fail to work after a few uses. I always save a little more and buy the version I know I'll trust.