Gifts For Beginner Photographers

This is a wonderful time with holiday savings approaching to advance your career from a beginner photographer to a professional photographer. When choosing a career path in photography there are several important factors to consider. Looking for some gift ideas for a beginner photographer might seem like a daunting task as you are looking for a good camera. A powerful external harddrive may be something that your beginner photographer would be interested in as it adds quite a bit of storage capacity for still images and video recordings. So, getting the perfect gift this holiday season can be a fun and enjoyable experience as well. We will look at some of the best gifts for photographers that not only make a good gift but also as a photography lover that wants to get the best photos, these products will assist the beginner photographer in your life to progress steadily in their photography skillset.

In addition to what we previously discussed, as a beginner photographer some useful gifts would go a long way to achieving their goal of becoming a professional photographer. It is important to couple your new camera with camera gear such as amazing lenses, a lens cap, a great camera bag and camera strap to carry all of the photography equipment needed for long vlog sessions or everything you need as a content creator. These make great photography gifts for beginners as they will be getting items with extreme functionality, peak design and your amateur photographer will quickly become your photographer friend.

There is a plethora of manufacturers that produce photography equipment ranging from good cameras to lenses and other products. Manufactures like Nikon, Fujifilm, Canon, Polaroid, Sony and others have great gift options this Christmas that will get the beginner photographer friend in your life ready to tackle their new career.

Looking at a gift guide for photography equipment, we will show some great useful gifts, tutorials and how to begin your career as a photographer and make every photoshoot smooth and beautiful.

Beginner Gift Guide

Starting Off

We recommend that you sign up the beginner photographer that you are shopping for to a photography course. There are many online tutorials and courses available as well as in brick-and-mortar environments such as photography school.

Cameras

Beginning with a good camera is obviously the first step to take when purchasing items for a beginner photographer. Your new camera should be able to take amazing high-quality images and video recordings. Some of the best full frame mirrorless DSLR cameras are available at discounted prices and this is the perfect time to pick one up. Your camera should also have great connectivity baked in with Wi-Fi and bluetooth for pairing with your smartphone and downloading editing software that is proprietary to your camera manufacturer or you can download other types of post processing software such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Once you have completed your post processing, your image is ready to be shared on social media or make a cool online photobook to share with your friends and loved ones. In addition, if you choose to shoot in a RAW format, this will allow for more post processing and your editing software will be able to offer more options to adjust your exposure.

Your camera should be able to record in 4K HDR with at least a standard of HLG or HDR 10 for high quality vibrant colors and clear sharp image production.

Your new camera should also come with a great autofocus system. Shooting in autofocus is a great way for beginner photographers to start off. This will allow for the camera presets and tracking of your subject all done with ease.

Also ensure that your camera comes with good stabilization such as IBIS or in body stabilization. This will help greatly when a beginner photographer is shooting handheld photography. We often notice that when shooting handheld there may be some shake and blur so having a good stabilization system or even adding a tripod to your camera gear will remove any worry about the exposure showing up blurry.

But, if you would like to progress in your career to become a professional photographer, use your DSLR camera in manual mode. This allows for the user to set the camera settings for that can be manually adjusted to fit your photoshoot. These can be things like you shutter speed, getting the correct ISO number based off existing ambient and natural light, white balance and your aperture opening. Shutter speeds reflect the amount of light entering the camera sensor, therefore choose your shutter speed wisely as a slow shutter speed with result in a long exposure and a fast shutter speed will give you a short exposure. These settings will all be depending on what type of shooting environment your beginner photographer is in.

Lenses

Pairing your new camera with a new camera lens that fits your photography needs is extremely important. Let’s say your new camera is a interchangeable lens camera, you can then choose from some of the best lenses available that you desire. There are choices ranging from prime lenses, that would come with a fixed focal length, zoom lenses or telephoto lenses which are great for portrait photography. Remember choosing the right lens for your shooting environment will help what type of digital photography your beginner is interested in. These can be general photography when you are out and about, portrait photography, landscape photography, and even macro photography. All of these will ensure that your image captures every pixel in high detail and ready to be shared on social media.

If you choose a lens from a manufacturer that differs from your camera. For example, if your purchase a Canon camera you will need a mounting adapter if you want to place a Nikon Nikkor Z Lens on it.

Sony’s G Master lineup of Gold Master of lenses also have tremendous features and specs like the 85mm f/1.4 GM II. This lens is a standard prime lens to be used on a full frame mirrorless DSLR cameras. Sony’s advanced new technology is included in this lens which gives the user more vibrant colors, sharper and more detailed images, a higher shooting resolution and wonderful bokeh effect for backgrounds.

When a purchasing a lens for a beginner photographer ensure that the lens comes with a florentine protection against dirt and dust, and get a camera lens and camera cleaning kit for your new digital camera and new lens to ensure longevity of your photography equipment.

External Hard Drives and Photo Printers

There are a variety of other essential items for a beginner photographer add to their camera gear, which will assist in getting their tremendous exposures ready to share with family and friends.

We highly recommend getting an external harddrive that is an SSD or Solid State Drive. These run faster than traditional HDD or Hard Disk Drives. These will have much better read/write speeds, and you can purchase hardrives that are up to 4TB and extremely portable. Having one of these in your camera bag will ensure that if your memory card runs out of space, you can easily transfer your images and video recordings to your external harddrive which will then allow you to free up space on the SD card that is being used inside your camera.

Grab a good photo printer that can be used to print out exposures for a memorable photography book. Photo printers can range from simple small amount of printing to professional printers like the HP Officejet Pro Plus series.

Lens Filters

Reflectors and lens filters such as polarizing filters or ND filters are great additions to a beginners’ camera gear. Some of these items would be found in a kit lens bundle when purchasing a camera lens for your new camera.

Neutral Density Filters or ND filters give the beginner photographer to take photos with their new lens and create soft and beautiful backgrounds, and the ND filter allows you to hit long exposures as well. This will help control the amount of ambient and natural light that hits your camera sensor. So, for example on bright sunny days a polarizer filter will help as well with the harsh lighting conditions of a bright shooting environment.

Retro Cameras

We love some unique retro cameras for beginner photographers. These are usually film print cameras such as the amazing Fujifilm Instax Mini 12. Like Polaroid cameras, they come in a peak design for a unique film camera. This camera is great gift for beginner photographers as it makes taking still images and videos an easy and fun experience. They can take selfies with their friends and family to share on social media. This camera will automatically adjust settings to handle existing ambient light or natural light in your shooting scene. These include the shutter speed, flash brightness and other settings which are all done for a photographer automatically. So even if you are an amateur photographer this great camera can still capture those high-quality images that you will love to print out and share. There are also holiday bundles of this camera which include your Fujifilm Mini 12 a 10pk White border film, a printed photobook which can hold up to 64 Instax Mini photos. There is also a drawstring pouch which is a great addition to a beginners’ camera gear as it conveniently holds the camera and film pack. In addition, there are 20 frame stickers with assorted designs such as solid blue, solid purple, an idea book for beginner photographers and a Fujifilm 1-year limited warranty.

Get Your Career Going

With the gift ideas provided that will serve a beginner photographer well in their pursuit in a photography career to progress to a professional photographer, and tutorials, you should be ready to shop for amazing photography equipment.

High quality photography products will have your beginner photographer ready to attack landscape photography, portrait photography and other photoshoots.

Utilize our gift guide and have your beginner photographer attend photography courses and before you know it, they will move along quickly with building their photography skillset.