I feel like I have done a fair amount of research in to photography as a hobby and a potential way to make money. I do not intend to cover nearly everything today. And as of yet I have not made any money. But I have been having fun and collecting camera gear.
Key take aways so far:
Go Canon. For $125 you can get a 50mm lens that will take great quality photos and is useful for just about anything other than landscape photography. The big deal is that this lens is a 1.8. The lower the F the nicer the picture your going to get.
There are differences between cropped and uncropped sensors. For practicality and as a novice the only difference seems to be that my cropped lenses won't work if I buy an uncropped and more expensive camera at some point later on. So this does not matter.
Buy a monopod AND a tripod. More on this in a future post.
I also highly recommend buying stuff through Amazon.(I get no money from them) Easy returns and they usually have a good protection plan you can buy. Definitely worth it if this is going to a business.
You can make great money in event/wedding photography but you need a bunch of equipment and spares. But you need good networking skills and the ability to market yourself.
Vistaprint.com (Again, no money from them) allows you to make nice and easy business cards. They also will let you custom embroider shirts...But they don't allow enough customization. A shirt that said "PHOTOGRAPHER" on the back would be perfect.
I need to spend an enormous amount of time using and learning Photoshop. One key to making money in this field is by selling stock photos. Stock photography as it was has basically been destroyed by the internet. You can still make money. Get on Shutterstock and similar websites that sell mass amounts of stock photos and find a way to stand out (meaning Photoshop skills). How it works now is that you get paid so many cents per download. Make a pretty enough picture and lots of people download it. Sounds simple enough.
The barriers of entry in to Photography appear very low. Yeah, some of these cameras and lenses are thousands of dollars. And a good starter portrait lens is just over $100 and a basic camera and kit can be had for less than $1000. I am noticing a number of these professionals all have YouTube accounts/websites/teach classes/ sell their own name brand gear/sell books all at once. I am guessing that if you want to make good money as a full time photographer you need to spread out and hit many different aspects of this photography at once. Beats digging ditches for a living.
There's all sorts of gear bags. Most of them look like shit. Seriously. Will you spend $2,000 on a lens and then put it in a super thin bag? HarborFreight.com (Once again- not a dime) sells hard side Pelican-like cases for $20-$40. Buy one for each lens. Use the extra space to store accessories. Note that they have metal eyelets on the larger cases. I suspect a couple of 'S' hooks or carabiners and a lanyard or strap of some kind would make a nice shoulder strap for these. I used one of these on a weekend trip to Yosemite to protect my camera gear. Worked great.
