What camera should you buy first?

If you’re looking into photography and have been looking at cameras, you’ve probably been bombarded with a million different types of cameras.

The first question you should ask yourself is, “what do I want to shoot?”.

The answer is usually “I don’t know!” And all of us photographers understand that feeling and have moved niches several times until we have found what we have liked.

Personally for pretty much all cases I’d recommend this camera, a Sony A6400.

Now I started with a Canon M50 and it’s a fantastic camera, other camera brands also have fantastic equivalents but the main reason I recommend the Sony A6400 is based on a few factors, reliability, technology, cost and the ability to grow with the Sony ecosystem.

Starting with the last thing and quite possibly my number reason for my choice of Sony. Sony has a huge range of excellent native lenses but they have an even larger selection when you include third party options. This is absolutely massive for beginners on a budget and allows you more budget friendly options to test out different types of lenses and since your new to this, lenses in many cases are more expensive than your camera and the value depreciates very slowly, unlike camera bodies. To give you an example, Canon’s RF mount is so limited, there’s a cheap version of a lens and an extremely pro level version of the same focal length, there’s no in between! For a 50mm lens, you can either buy the $300 lens or the $4000 lens with no other options! For Sony you have like 6 options! The other benefit for Sony’s lens mount being so open is that you can get unique focal lengths that their own lens line up doesn’t have for example, they have a 16-35mm zoom lens, a 24-70mm zoom lenses or a 70-200mm zoom lens. These are usually coined as “the holy trinity” as they cover from super wide to super telephoto, but what if you just want a lens that sits in the middle of those focal ranges? Well guess what, Tamron has a 35-150mm lens!

Reason 2 why I picked the A6400. Reliability and relevance in technology. The A6400 is a little bit older now but that doesn’t mean it lacks in performance, many pros still use this very camera right now because it has never missed a beat, the technology in this camera is still very comparable to the newer versions coming out today, the auto focus, the video capabilities, the image quality, everything!

And on the note of it being older, this lowers the cost, there’s many more of these cameras that are second hand than the newer cameras meaning you can possibly find an incredible deal somewhere or better yet but it brand new at a slashed price.

This camera will be absolutely fine for you to start off with for all genres/niches of photography. Happy snapping!