Buy Pro Camera Gear On A Student Budget
Professional camera gear is prohibitively expensive for most hobbyists. If you’re not paying your bills with your lens work, use PetaPixel’s guide to pick up great lenses and other gear on the cheap.
Photo by Marc Lacoste.
Photography website PetaPixel shares a guide to purchasing nice gear on a student budget. The heart of their technique is to purchase exclusively used lenses. The best way to get used lenses? Search out package deals:
It’s pretty much always the case that someone selling multiple items together as a package must sell it for significantly less than the sum of each item separately. They are, in a sense, exchanging the extra money they could earn for the time they save by selling it all at once. This presents a great opportunity for the photographer looking for a good deal on a particular item in the package. If a package you come across includes a piece of equipment you want along with many pieces you don’t want, and is extremely cheaply priced, buy it all and sell off everything you don’t want. If the price was good enough, there’s a good chance you’ll end up paying nothing for the gear you wanted after selling off the rest.
The inverse of that rule is to always sell your gear in individual pieces to maximise your profit. Using their own purchasing log as an example, they point out that if they were to sell all their gear right now at fair market prices, they’d be out roughly $US300 or so but would have enjoyed the use of nearly $US4,000 worth of equipment, all thanks to careful shopping in the used market. Check out the full article below for more tips on filling your camera bag on the cheap.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I was just thinking about upgrading my lens. Anybody have any suggestions for a decent, cheap all-around lens for travel use? (canon)
I'd add a couple of points that are useful for cameras but also to other goods purchased on craigslist: make sure to check out the equipment before exchanging money (you might want to take a body just to make sure a lens works properly); keep track of when you buy and sell equipment, not just that it happened; and be patient and flexible--the more rushed or specific you are, the less likely you are to find a good deal.
One point specific to photography, which the article mentions but is worth repeating: it's all about the lenses. They make all the difference and they can be used forever. Camera bodies come and go, but good lenses can be used for many years.
sweetmonkey
(1) Learn to love manual focus
(2) Shoot film
Nikon and Pentax DSLRs can mostly mount manual focus lenses from prior decades. Canon and Olympus DSLRs can mount a lot of old lenses from many makers via adaptors, because of their shorter register distance.
This means that, if you can do without autofocus, you can access to some pretty fantastic lenses for a tiny fraction of what the modern equivalent would cost. (In some cases, there is no modern equivalent - neither my 35mm f/1.4 AIS nor my 400mm f/5.6 ED AIS have equivalents in Nikon's current lineup.)
Old lenses also frequently have better build quality, not to mention superior focus rings and DOF scales.
And if you don't mind shooting film, you can take advantage of all the film equipment pros have been selling off to go digital. This is particularly advantageous in the medium format world. Around $250-500 should be enough to set up a very nice outfit in a number of systems (Mamiya RB67, 645, or TLR, or Pentax 6x7, for example.) Good medium format gear and a good film will often do far more for you then a modern pro lens on a 35mm or crop-factor DSLR, and often for a lot less.
cellophane303
@calvin6:
It's a mixed bag. Some eBay sellers are great, others are dishonest or don't know what they're selling. Check feedback, follow your instincts, etc.
Another used option is keh.com. Their ratings are both conservative and reliable (i.e., their "bargain" lenses would be rated by many ebay sellers as "excellent" or "like new" in some cases). They also have a good return policy. They're not the cheapest, and they recently raised their prices on a lot of gear, but they're worth keeping an eye on.
can anyone tell me if it's a smart idea to buy from ebay? because the bundles they have on there are significantly cheaper than buying on...say amazon. it includes body, 2 or 3 different lenses, cleaning kit, SD card, etc. I'm a little hesitant though since it's ebay and was wondering if anyone has had any experience on the matter...
calvin6
If you can shoot fully manual (focus and exposure), old Nikon pre-AI lenses typically are dirt cheap and optically identical or superior than their modern brethren in some cases.
The downside? Depending on which Nikon body you own, Nikon F mount lenses are NOT backwards compatible all the way to 1959. D40, D40x, D60 and D5000 can mount old pre-AI lenses without any modifications, anything else needs to have an AI-conversion done on the lens before it can be used safely without damaging your camera body.
Amanda Emily
Shooting film is the easiest way to save on photography. I know in today's world of taking 9,000 shots a day and keeping 12 is economical while paying $15 or more for a roll of chrome + processing and scanning seems ludicrous. Instead shoot film and get your slides sent out at Walmart (or a similar place) and buy a good $200 scanner and viola!
@kukkurovaca: I'll second KEH and add B&H for used equipment.
I've bought from both and they are quite reliable.
With eBay, I always ask myself, "Would I be willing to take however much money this thing costs plus shipping and set it on fire right now?" If the answer is no then I don't bid.
@krysjez: That's what I use -- a changing bag. I bought a pretty big one and put my arms up to my elbows in it and so far haven't had any problems with light leaking.
It's not nearly as nice as having a darkroom but it works.
@Real Cheese Flavor: Wait, you don't need a darkroom? The only time I developed B&W film outside a darkroom, I put everything in a black bag with holes for my hands, but light leaked in anyway. :(
@battra92: You can also develop your own B&W film at home. It's amazingly easy, relatively cheap, teaches you a lot about the whole photographic process, and you actually do not need a darkroom to do it.
If you don't want to do that or you're shooting color film, most "professional" photo stores will process (but not print) your film for a fairly decent price.
I think in general you learn a lot more about the art of photography if you're shooting film. Knowing you only have 36 times however many rolls of film you have with you really makes you think about what you're doing each time you press the shutter button as opposed to as you said taking 9,000 shots and keeping 12.
Film cameras sales collapsed as digital cameras improved from 2003- 2006. But, the last generation of film cameras had all the great auto-focus and auto-exposure technology of the digital cameras.
The Nikon N75 is a super-light (plastic) camera with great technology that sells for $50-$80. The more rugged Nikon F100 was "THE" top pro journalist camera in the early 2000s; this solid, high-end camera can be found used for $200-300. Both of these cameras work perfectly with the latest AF and VR lenses form Nikon. The in-lens motor makes the N75 very speedy on new nikon lenses; the powerful camera motor lets the F100 quickly focus non-AFS lenses.
With mail-order developing, you get a high-resolution scan along with the prints. Ironically, film died just as it became "almost" as convenient as digital. If a digital camera costs $800 or $1,200 every three years, that adds up to a lot of film!
Film has two things over digital:
- High dynamic range, non-linear so your highlights aren't blown out as easily.
- 35mm is the equivalent of 25-50m pixels, although equivalence is not really a simple measure.
Tom Stermitz
@balls187: scratch that: 2 of the lenses are pro lenses. The rest of the kit is pedestrian.
@This website is a good reference for older Nikon gear to anyone wishing to go that route. Just about every kind of pre-autofocus lens is listed there. If anyone's looking into getting a manual-focus Nikon body, it also goes into great detail (with pictures) on of the parts and features of each camera, plus the available accessories.
I paid just a little over $100 for my FE2, then $15-20 for a seal replacement kit. The AI/AI-S lenses cost around $100 each (or less, especially for primes!), and it takes a standard threaded shutter release cable instead of the expensive proprietary ones that newer Nikons use. All of my primes and smaller zoom lenses take 52mm filters, so more savings there. Plus, since it's a low-power camera, I only need to worry about replacing the (tiny) battery every couple of years.
None of those lenses listed in that spread sheet are "pro" lenses. You also notice that while camera bodies drop considerably in value used, lenses do not. So the idea of getting that sweet 70-200 f2.8 IS for much less than $1350 is just a pipe dream.
@Real Cheese Flavor: Exactly. I used to do 35mm B&W in the darkroom but these days I shoot a lot of slides. Developing that is difficult at home.
i can absolutely vouch for this argument. I used to work a used camera store. The owner would buy out an entire old studio, and sell everything individually. By the way he ran things you would think the place would've ran out of business long ago, but the profits kept them alive for a very long time (still). And they rarely deal with digital equipment... most of their stuff is film.
i was the one who posted all the items for sale, and i can say that there was quite the markup on just about everything.