The best thing I ever did was go on a short course before making my decision. Our local ‘new’ university had evening classes and offered some free/very cheap.

The few bits and pieces I picked up from the tutor and fellow classmates were really useful. Tutors tend to explain things in plain English, might have second hand kit for sale, or kit you can borrow from college/uni to see what suits you. And they taught me how to use Photoshop appropriately! It also meant I now have a group of photography mates locally to swap ideas, share transport and kit.

I bought an entry level Nikon D60, which only cost about £450 3 years ago (with a standard kit lens, memory card and spare battery) but you can get them second hand for under £200. As others have said, this was a small investment in a system which you can add to – I added a wide angle lens, a couple of filters and that’s been enough to get my by so far.

I even got a tripod from Aldi for £15…

You also don’t need seventeen thousand trillion megapixels – I have ten and that’s just fine. Quality over quantity and all that.

My website is down now (forgot to pay the bill!) but I took decent images at mtb races, won a few photographic comps and even managed to sell a few prints too.

Just proves you don’t need to spend a fortune to make it work.

Happy snapping!

REALLY not a fan of tilt shift photography for some reason.

ditto, especially now there’s a fake tilt-shift feature in every smartphone/compact now.

same argument for the increasing use of (fake) HDR.

Nice moon shot up there ^^^ btw 🙂

REALLY not a fan of tilt shift photography for some reason.

I agree it can be very overdone and if you look at my little test gallery, only three have the the obvious miniaturisation effect (had to be done as a first play). I was personally much more interested in proper correction, and stitching images together.

Oh and which one’s were HDR’d? 😉

My best purchase was this lens, use it all the time for sports stuff.

+1 Great lens

+1 fro Ariadne’s comments.

DEFINITELY worth finding like minded folk locally to ask and share with.

I’ve loaned kit to friends before and in fact still have a mate’s 2X extender that I really must give back to him.

The DPR forums can be tedious at best.

The photography section on AVForums is great

Oh and which one’s were HDR’d?

Hard to tell as most seem really nicely balanced but I’ll guess number 5 was. Not sure what’s going on with the angles on the wooden section though, looks a bit optical-illusiony to me.

However I’ve always maintained that the image quality of full frame sensors plss all over crop sensors. To this day I prefer the IQ from my 5D mk1 to my 7D.

+1

Going to sell the 7D when I get round to it. 🙂