The advantages of expensive professional photography equipment are obvious, first of all, it is high quality, reliability, advanced technologies, and a huge number of various settings, and accessories that allow the photographer to choose the ones that are optimal for solving their tasks.
By photography, I mean all the technical means related to the process of taking pictures: cameras, lenses, flashes, accessories, studio equipment, and so on.
But what about photographers with a limited budget, because all this costs a lot of money?
In this article, we will list several ways to save on photography equipment.
- The first way is the equipment rental.
If you cannot afford to buy expensive photo equipment, you can rent it for the duration of the shooting.
In large cities, there are now many rental points for renting photography equipment, both cameras, and lenses, as well as equipment for video shooting and studio lighting.
In order to effectively use the rental time of photographic equipment, you need to build your work in such a way as to get several orders on the day of rental. Then you will pay less for the equipment, and get a good profit from orders.
- The second way is to buy equipment on the secondary market.
The secondary market for photography equipment is quite oversaturated. Therefore, by carefully monitoring it, you can buy a good camera or lens at a very competitive price. As a rule, when selling photographic equipment that was previously used the price decreases by 30 percent, or even more.
The disadvantages of this method: you need to carefully check the goods before buying since you do not know who and how used it and what hidden defects may be in it. If you live in a city where there are service centers of the respective companies, you can arrange an analysis and get a diagnosis of equipment.
- The third way - Chinese counterparts of famous brands.
This method is more suitable for the purchase of accessories and lighting equipment. Now the Chinese have learned to make very high-quality products, some of them are very decent indeed.
However, the cameras and lenses that are manufactured by most Chinese companies still leave much to be desired in quality, so you should not buy them.
The disadvantage of this method: if you are to find an issue with a piece of equipment, the goods will have to be sent back to the seller. The rules of conduct and the entire process of buying and returning products will differ in your country and a company that you are dealing with.
- The fourth way is to buy "gray photography equipment."
Gray equipment is a technique that is smuggled into a country. Accordingly, it does not have an official guarantee and will not be accepted for warranty repairs to a service center.
Sometimes stores selling gray photography equipment find a workaround and take on warranty issues, but in this case, the solution to your problem can be very delayed. Therefore, everything is up to you, you either get a licensed product that can later be fixed but you pay an extra buck for it, or you get a gray product that cannot be fixed, but you are going to pay less for it, you decide.
Tags: camera, hobby, Photographer, Tips