What are you interested in? If it's birds in flight, plan on spending some more money than if you want to take deer, turkey etc. There are as many different opinions about this as their are camera mfgs, but for my money the Canon 20D makes a great all around camera. You could spend 3 grand more and get a state of the art Canon or Nikon body, but if its great game shots you want, spend your money on lenses, flashes, monopods, extenders, etc. Finally, start weight lifting. Until you've lugged a digital SLR camera and a 16 lb lens, you havent ever really experienced photography!
Trent
Trent
I will assume you want a digital SLR with autofocus and a fair amount of memory. That rig will cost about $1500. If you start out with a camera like the 20D that has a built in flash you can save about $250 to $400 depending on what flash you ultimately end up buying. You will not be satisfied with the built in flash very long. Now comes the fun part. Again using the 20D as a baseline, that gets you an inexpensive plastic bodied kit lens that gives you a 18-55 mm zoom. Again, its not a bad lens, but you arent going to be using it to take high quality outdoor photos. As soon as you can, you are going to want to buy at least 200 mm of focal length. There are hundreds of these on the market and you get what you pay for. You can get a decent sigma 200mm for around $400 or you can spend $1600 for a Canon 70-200 IS which give you auto focus with image stabilization in Canon's top of the line body. When you start looking at websites like the Canon Digital Photography Forum or many of the photographers on this forum, you start seeing 400 and even 600mm lenses from time to time to catch those amazing bird in flight shots or really close up natural shots of wildlife in the field. You can easily spend $6,000 on some of these lenses. So it really depends on your budget and your desire. You can get into photography for $500 and may be perfectly happy or you can spend about $3 grand and really be on your way to some life long quality equipment. Dont get hung up on trying to outbuy the market on megapixels. Anything over 8 is going to be irrelevant unless you plan on making some pretty huge prints and selling them to magazines. Sorry about the long answer, but there's a million ways to go here as I'm sure others will attest.
Trent
Trent
Lan-Lord
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While the dSLR route is probably the better route, if you have to work within a smaller budget, and you dont plan on making a living with wildlife and nature photos (but they would be good enough to print, frame, and hang in your house) I like the new panasonic FZ cameras. They have Image Stabilization, nice big(12x) lecia zoom, and pic quality isnt all that bad. Also, I have seen folks add a 1.7x teleconverter to it, in order to get a little more reach.
This is what I did with my old sony f707. 10x zoom (including digital!) + 1.7x teleconverter, giving a total of 17x. He was standing about 40 yards away
This is what I did with my old sony f707. 10x zoom (including digital!) + 1.7x teleconverter, giving a total of 17x. He was standing about 40 yards away
