The final key to taking great pictures is making the right choices in equipment.  Let’s start at the floor and work up.  The first step is pretty easy.  You absolutely need a tripod.  To fully control the situation, there’s nothing better than a tripod.  It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but holding the camera will just guarantee yourself a headache.  Now the camera choice gets a bit more complicated.

Basically you have two choices to make, one is capture style and one is quality.  You can either have a point and shoot style or digital single lens reflex camera.  Unless you are really really into photography, you have absolutely no need for an incredibly pricey SLR camera, plus, if you are that into photography you probably stopped reading this blog post a long time ago.  So, I’m fairly confident that you want a point-and-shoot.  These types of cameras are designed to be easy to use and with plenty of power where as SLRs allow for maximum control over the final product and also take SLR lens attachements.  The second question is quality.  It seems like the only thing going up faster than gas prices is the megapixels avalaible to cameras.  Do you need 5, 10, or even 15?  According to me, anything five or over will be perfectly fine for anything except the smallest of products.  I myself use a 5 megapixel camera here at TatStore and only regret it for our smallest parts.  Even then a 7 or 8 megapixel camera would be more than enough.

I’d like to share one little tip for shopping on the cheap, go to a big box store and look for an open box special.  It will come with all the same warranties as the other new cameras the only difference is that it won’t have that new camera smell.  I recently purchased a beautiful point and shoot 8.1 megaphixel sony for $119.  I didn’t know what kind of a deal that was at the time, but I later saw the same camera in the same store for $399.  So keep your eyes peeled, and know what you’re looking for.