My first real camera was a Canon 700D series cropped sensor DSLR. It is, in a couple words, a beginner’s camera. At the time I was partnering with a friend to try our hand on creating an Amazon shop. My major was graphic design in college so I felt pretty comfortable learning how to do photography for this specific purpose.

Disappointingly, the first time I held the camera. I didn’t feel much for it. It was merely a tool to me. In that way, I found no interest in it. 

Thinking back now. The 700D is an incredible camera for the price. It has the ability to shoot exceptional photos and video in its most basic but reliable form. Unfortunately it failed to draw me in. I kept it in one setting and never took it out of the studio. That was a big mistake. Our Amazon store continued to flourish and rise in popularity. As my skills in design and marketing improved and our sales went up. My interested in photography was stagnant.

Last year I was browsing Youtube and came up on Mattias Berling’s channel. Mattias is a camera reviewer whose unique focus is on fairly old forgotten digital cameras that were released during and after the 2000’s. In particular, his review of the Sigma DP2 really caught my attention. At this time I barely knew what the Sigma brand was, let alone a Foveon sensor. I ended up buying this camera from a used market app here in China called XianYu. It was the first time I bought a camera for myself as a hobbyist.

Looking back this was a terrible choice for a hobbyist’s first camera. A slow, clunky, although well built, piece of hardware. Mattias still managed to sell it to me though. Why? The RAW files it produced. If you have ever owned a Sigma Foveon sensor camera, you might understand the experience. If you haven’t, go buy one! The Sigma DP1 and DP2 can be found for under $100 on ebay if you look hard enough.

This camera made me fall in love with photography. Not because it was a cheap decent camera, but because it surprised me unlike most cameras I have used prior.The RAW files produced by this camera are insane. Crisp, full of color, and gives you lots of room to play in post production. The differences between the Canon 700D and this old beat up Sigma DP2 were so vast, and I preferred the latter much more in comparison due to it’s quirky nature. It’s just a strange, difficult to use, compact brick. But I loved it. 

Going through this taught me that taking photos was not just a point and shoot experience. You had to work for it. Many times the struggle is with your gear itself as you are learning. As you improve, so does your gear. Another important lesson is that you don’t need to drop thousands on a camera body and lens to achieve fantastic results. As a beginner it is merely too much for you to start with. Instead, I would rather play with cheap used cameras which are rapidly dropping in price each year that passes. 

Nowadays. I use a more modern camera at work for professional studio photos. At home, it is almost an entirely different story. My collection consists of older forgotten camera systems that are asking to be revived. The reason I’m doing this? I want to revisit cameras that today are not only incredibly accessible, but wildly affordable. I want to visit an age of photography that was all about experimentation.  

I’ve long dismissed photography as being difficult to enter and expensive. It turns out this is not really the case as long as you keep an open mind and embrace the process of exploration. At a certain point hesitation becomes too much of a burden and you must take the dive. Once you do so you may find doors open to you that otherwise you wouldn’t have seen before. 

- Joshua