Basic Equipment For Your Photography Business
If you're thinking of starting a photography business, there a few important pieces of equipment that you must have to be successful, today. Even if you don't have a lot of money to spend, it's a good idea to by the best and most technologically advanced equipment your budget will allow. Stay with the basics, the equipment that will cover most of what you want to do, renting any special equipment, as needed. This will allow you to get better equipment of the kind you will use often with out spreading your equipment budget too thin on things that will be of little immediate service to you.
As your business grows and you begin to make money, you can buy any special equipment you have been renting with the advantage of having tried it. You can also upgrade your equipment as it becomes necessary. You might want to consider insuring your equipment so that you can replace it if it gets lost, damaged, or stolen without having to come up with the purchase price once again.
Of course, your most important piece of equipment will be your digital camera. Though you might be able to use what you have, a professional digital camera will give you features an everyday camera can't match. This is especially true of models that use interchangeable lenses. Know that what you are getting will do what you need to do. Published equipment reviews can be helpful in finding the best equipment for the job, but don't forget the photography discussion forums where the photographers' discuss their experiences with different types of equipment.
A darkroom is no longer necessary, but you will need an up to date computer that can run the software that you will be using to edit your photos. It should have plenty of RAM for editing your photos and plenty of hard drive space for storage. Also a CD-R or DVD-R drive so images you don't want to lose, should your hard drive fail, can be stored permanently. You will also need a card reader or other device to transfer photos from your camera to your computer. Most cameras come with the necessary transfer software and cable, but using a card reader will save your batteries.
Whether or not you need your own photo printer will depend and what you do in photography. Most prints can be inexpensively outsourced. You can use professional services that specialize in what you do such as portraits or weddings. Or you can load your images up to a site such as Dot Photo and order prints online. You can even take a disk of photos to a place like WalMart and have prints made there. The benefit of using any of these methods is that you will have genuine photographic prints, as opposed to ink jet prints.
If you will be selling stock photos, you won't need to work with prints at all. In the past stock photography was shot on slide film and today digital files -- generally very large digital files -- are used. If you do find that a photo printer is needed, use it only to produce prints and get an inexpensive printer for printing out everything else, such as forms and correspondence.
As for things, such as lighting, props and backgrounds, whether or not you need them, and what types are best, will depend on what you shoot and how you shoot it. Sports photographers, for example, probably won't need studio lighting.