I am currently a Nikon shooter. I started with a Panasonic Lumix in the olden days when I was shooting my children’s sporting events. Soon realized that that wasn’t going to cut it. At that time Nikon had a d70 with a lens for the affordable price of 1100 dollars. I was in heaven but soon realized that the kit lens wasn’t going to do. Those early day digitals would introduce unusable images over iso 400. So as the years passed I progressed through most of the models by Nikon. Always budget minded I would use third party lenses when I could. Since I couldn’t afford the best I had to make it up with technique and understanding limitations of my equipment. I learned how to manual focus with a 400mm AIS 4.5 lens. I learned how to hold a lens steady before VR was a thing. While I can’t use the “back in the film days” speech, I have come a long way. I currently have 2 dslrs and 2 mirrorless Nikons. I have both Nikon and third party lenses and am equally pleased with all of it. I am not a gear snob, I will use whatever works to get my images preferring to master my technique than thinking the next great thing will do it for me. Steve Perry from Backwoods Gallery has a good saying, “Its the 80/4 rule, 80% is the equipment and the 4 is the 4 inches behind that lens.” The other part rarely mentioned is the post processing. My equipment of choice is a M1 Mac mini, 16 gb ram running Photoshop. Fast cards and a proficiency for photoshop make for a very streamlined work flow and minimal frustration. My biggest weakness is organization , I have a NAS with about 12 TB of space but I have come to a new conclusion. Unless the photo is of a lifer, mega rare or a favorite rarity I will just delete and let Facebook and E-bird be my library of bird photos.. In the end it really was the journey to get those pics , the people I met and the places I visited that was most important to me. So don’t sweat over the gear get out and enjoy the journey!
