When I switched to digital photography, someone recommended I start with the canon rebel, and I’m still using that same camera 12 years later. Honestly it’s a good camera that’s not too expensive and light weight, and there’s probably lots of refurbished ones for super cheap online. I can’t speak as much to Nikon since I stuck with canon, but really any basic dslr from either of those companies would be good, just avoid full frame sensors if you want it to be light weight and reasonably priced lol. If anything, invest more in getting decent lenses – just ensure the lens is compatible with the camera you choose. For nature photography, a good telephoto lens for anything far away and a macro lens for small close ups, and the standard zoom lens that comes with just about every dslr kit to get everything in between.
Someone else may have better recommendations because I haven’t kept up with all the new fancy features that have come out since, but imo the ability to use a variety of lenses for different purposes is what sets a dslr camera apart from what phone cameras are capable of doing these days.
Thanks I’ll check it out! Cannon scares me because of their printers lol, I don’t need some special software to use it right, just microSD or regular SD and any PC? I’m always gunshy about buying tech these days, everything needs an app or is internet connected lol.
Oh god yes printers in general are awful and scammy, so I totally understand your hesitation! You shouldn’t need any special software unless you plan to shoot in raw format, but you can change that setting in the camera and it probably defaults to jpeg anyways – raw is great if you want absolutely lossless data since there’s always some compression in jpeg, but you’ll have to convert raw to some other format eventually anyways (jpeg, png, or my personal favorite is tiff when working with layers). The built in windows photo viewer won’t display raw files but the equivalent in Mac does iirc. The only other time I’ve used special software is when shooting tethered to a computer – canon has a specific program so you can live view what the camera is seeing, which is great for composing nice shots since the computer screen is much larger than the one on the camera, and adobe Lightroom also does this, fyi – that’s typically done for product/portrait studio photography anyways.
I believe the canon rebel t6 was the first that you could connect the camera via internet/Bluetooth to transfer files remotely, but that’s optional and I’ve never used it nor do I want to. I just use the SD card to transfer my files manually, and I have an old copy of Photoshop cs6 (before the subscription-based cc) that I use for editing if/when I feel like it. Gimp is probably better but I learned Photoshop and just couldn’t get myself to learn an entirely different program.
When I switched to digital photography, someone recommended I start with the canon rebel, and I’m still using that same camera 12 years later. Honestly it’s a good camera that’s not too expensive and light weight, and there’s probably lots of refurbished ones for super cheap online. I can’t speak as much to Nikon since I stuck with canon, but really any basic dslr from either of those companies would be good, just avoid full frame sensors if you want it to be light weight and reasonably priced lol. If anything, invest more in getting decent lenses – just ensure the lens is compatible with the camera you choose. For nature photography, a good telephoto lens for anything far away and a macro lens for small close ups, and the standard zoom lens that comes with just about every dslr kit to get everything in between.
Someone else may have better recommendations because I haven’t kept up with all the new fancy features that have come out since, but imo the ability to use a variety of lenses for different purposes is what sets a dslr camera apart from what phone cameras are capable of doing these days.
Thanks I’ll check it out! Cannon scares me because of their printers lol, I don’t need some special software to use it right, just microSD or regular SD and any PC? I’m always gunshy about buying tech these days, everything needs an app or is internet connected lol.
Oh god yes printers in general are awful and scammy, so I totally understand your hesitation! You shouldn’t need any special software unless you plan to shoot in raw format, but you can change that setting in the camera and it probably defaults to jpeg anyways – raw is great if you want absolutely lossless data since there’s always some compression in jpeg, but you’ll have to convert raw to some other format eventually anyways (jpeg, png, or my personal favorite is tiff when working with layers). The built in windows photo viewer won’t display raw files but the equivalent in Mac does iirc. The only other time I’ve used special software is when shooting tethered to a computer – canon has a specific program so you can live view what the camera is seeing, which is great for composing nice shots since the computer screen is much larger than the one on the camera, and adobe Lightroom also does this, fyi – that’s typically done for product/portrait studio photography anyways.
I believe the canon rebel t6 was the first that you could connect the camera via internet/Bluetooth to transfer files remotely, but that’s optional and I’ve never used it nor do I want to. I just use the SD card to transfer my files manually, and I have an old copy of Photoshop cs6 (before the subscription-based cc) that I use for editing if/when I feel like it. Gimp is probably better but I learned Photoshop and just couldn’t get myself to learn an entirely different program.