🪴 Quartz 4.0

Photography Starter Guide

Jul 19, 20254 min read

My Current Setup

Camera Gear

  1. My mirrorless starter kit:
    1. Body: Fujifilm XT30ii ($1000base) FUJIFILM X-T30 II Mirrorless Camera with XC 15-45mm OIS 16759732
    2. Starter lens: 18-55mm willoughbys.com
      1. pretty good value for a starter lens, zoom is good entry point for a beginner
    3. Street lens: 35mm f1.4Amazon.com : Fujifilm XF35mmF1.4 R : Digital Slr Camera Lenses : Electronics
      1. beautiful bokeh, field of view similar to real life, slower
    4. Portrait Lens Sony - E 50mm F1.8 OSS Portrait Lens, Black| SEL50F18
      1. beautiful, my go-to portrait lens, but i wouldn’t personally start with this as its really tight (limiting esp for travel / landscape)
    5. Landscape Lens: 23mm
      1. Lowkey I want to return this lol. Or resell it.
  2. Pre-mirrorless:
    1. My dad gifted me a nikon d7200 starter kit from costco for Christmas. it lasted me through high school travel, photography camp, and yearbook duties, but its weight/size (2-3x a mirrorless) was a burden.
  3. What got me into photography is watching my sister take photos
  4. Post-mirrorless?
    1. I’ve been experimenting with videos (Summer 2024) as the next step from photography. Videography is an entirely new beast I want to grapple with, but requires a different POV and set of skills that I’ve bookmarked for later.

Post-Production

The sneaky thing about photos is that your shots won’t look great out of camera (unless you use Fuji’s film simulations, of course). After taking photos, you have to upload them to your computer and edit them in Lightroom/Photoshop/Darkroom in order to really draw out the colors.

Software

  1. Editing: Lightroom
  2. File management: Playbook
  3. Instagram Story Collaging: Unfold

Workflow

Go on photowalk → take photos → transfer photos from camera to computer/phone → edit in Lightroom → export as JPG → transfer to phone for sharing

Getting Started

  1. A good camera body is baseline — what really improves your camera quality is your lens quality
    1. Tip: you can always order camera lens second-hand online!
    2. To do it all over again, I would start with a mirrorless. You get so much immediate output from the in-camera film simulations (a common beginner complaint is that the colors dont’ show up as well on raw images compared to iPhone, which is because iPhone automatically applies a filter!)
  2. Why should I get a camera? My phone shoots photos well enough!
    1. Photos taken by the iPhone look consistent. Consistently okay, consistently good enough. A fantastic way to document moments on a day-to-day basis.
    2. Photos taken by a camera have a low floor and a high ceiling. Just like any tool, you need some level of experience and skill in order to coax the best quality photos from it — and your beginning photos will look overexposed, blurry, dull, etc etc.
    3. But a camera is a vehicle to show others the way you see the world. You have so much more control over the amount of details & colors, the motion & lack thereof. A phone has a tiny sensor and a lot of [computational photography](The iPhone 11 and the power of “computational photography” – CamerAgX – a new life for old gear) behind the scenes that approximates the best photo. But by trusting Apple’s algorithms, you are resorting to what Apple and previous data has dictated to be the way to see the world, not your own unique point of view.
    4. Photography is a hobby that marries a romantic appreciation for beauty with the technical itch to understand its inner processings.

Inspiration

Youtubers

I consume a good number of street photography content, which has reframed the practice less as a hobby and more as a philosophy. My favorite street photographers: 1. Faizal Westcott Other musings on photography: 4. street photography 5. syncresis 6. Introvert vs Extrovert Activities 7. the camera as a social distance device

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