Don't Cheap-Out

Photographer: Al Jurina

I will admittedly say that this is a very difficult subject to write on. Mainly because I am pretty frugal when it comes to making good decisions on photography gear or accessories. I fit the old German proverb of "Buy it cheap, buy it again."

In many things in life, we are prone to hunting down the deals. In particular, when it comes to hobbies. In fact, I'd say that the real hobby might just be finding "deals" on things. However, when it comes to photography, I have yet to find a great "deal" when shopping for photography gear. Almost ALL of the stuff that I have bought, which includes, tripods, filters, camera straps, lenses, batteries, memory cards and even cameras have let me down, if they were bought with the mindset of saving money.
Now, this is not to say that there is no such thing as a good price for equipment. Sometimes you can get lucky. I'm actually talking about buying knock-off brands, or 3rd party brands, because you think that the 200 dollar's you'll save is better than what the name brand has. Let me tell you from experiences of  tripod knobs snapping off in the field, memory cards that fail, lenses that don't autofocus correctly or give strange color casts, filters that reduce the sharpness of your lenses, batteries that don't hold a charge for more than a few days of light use, that trying to save money this way can cost you in the end.

If I can give one piece of advice for buying photography gear it's this:

Buy reputable name brand stuff and you'll never go wrong. Buy anything different and you're playing with fire.

Now, if you are just a hobbyist, looking to experiment and learn along the way, then there's really no harm to those risks. However, in the end, your pockets will probably be just as empty if you had bought the name-brands, because the cheaper stuff is most-likely cheaper for a reason. 

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