I’m totally new to photography and want to get my first camera. I’ll mainly be using it for nature photography while hiking and traveling.
My only focus is on photos of the highest possible quality.
My budget is around $600, and I’ll also need essential accessories, but don’t know what I’d need, like a lens?
Not open to refurbished, as I’m buying in Vietnam.
Asking for image quality as your only target is meaningless here, a camera that has excellent highspeed performance may be terrible in low light. A camera is constantly balancing three points, shutter speed, ISO and apature, a good camera lets you easily manage them all.
Ok, other people have posted some excellent comments, I am here to point you in the right direction when you have decided to actually get a new camera.
For context, I am an IT technician with an interest in photography, I mainly take photos of transportation and infrastructure.
Finally, I live in Sweden and have no idea of what the camera market is like in Vietnam.
Ok, lets start off with some generic recommendations.
If you want to take photos of wild animals you will need a long lens, say 200mm minimum, I have a Sigma 100-400mm supertele zoom lens, I haven’t tried to take photos of real wild animals, only those at Skansen in Stockholm or birds at the train station.
However long lenses are often expensive, so lets talk about lenses other lenses.
Prime lenses have are fixed, the don’t have zoom, they tend to be sharper and weigh less, but they restrict your framing. However they often offer a wide apature, the apature is what restricts the ammount of light being let in when the shutter is open. It also affects the sharpness, the wider the apature, the shallower the depth of field in the photo.
I have a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens in my kit, it is a lovely lens, photographing grass with a super wide f/1.8 can get you some fantastic bokeh.
Ok, so we have discussed supertele zoom and prime lenses, both are fantastic, but you probably don’t want to lug a supertele zoom lens every day, they are quite heavy, and just going with a 50mm every day can be a bit too restrictive. That is where you look at tele zoom lenses.
They are in the range of a maximum zoom of 100-150mm
I have a gorgeous 24-105 f/4 lens as my main lens, now most zoom lenses have a variable apature, this means that as you zoom in the maximum apature you can use will be smaller, ironically, the smaller the apature, the bigger the number.
A fixed apature zoom lens will be more expensive, but gives you more creativity.
Well… I have no clue.
Wait, I mean it sincerely!
I have no idea of the market in Vietnam, but some general ideas are:
Micro 4/3, this is a system developed by Olympus and Panasonic, it is a smaller sensor making it harder to take photos with less light, but the weight is much lower, and since it is such a small sensor you need to account for crop factor. This means that every lens you use with the system actually have double the zoom, so a 14-140mm lens becomes in reality a 28-280mm lens.
Olympus has left the camera market, but a new company was spun off to manage the resources they had, OM System.
Panasonic mostly focus on video in the m43 segment these days.
Full frame sensors will give you more light, but are more expensive.
If you are just trying to learn the basics, get a decent superzoom camera, a camera with an integrated lens, they are fine.
Thanks. What do you think of the Canon EOS R50?
Looks like a fine camera, the RF system is excellent and you can upgrade as needed