Best products from r/photoit

Read John Harrington's book as soon as you can: Best Business Practices For Photogaphers

In the meantime, as everyone has said, charge for everything. Materials should get a small (18%) markup; figure out a cost per shot and a base creative fee -- the creative fee is paid to you for your time, vision and mastery of technique; the licensing is paid to you per shot for a given target (web, print ad, promotional material, etc.)

If it makes life easier, do the above math and then create a rate based on a set number of images, so if your creative fee is $750/day, and each image license is $350/year, then pick x number of images as a minimum, add it to the creative fee and you've got a ballpark you can use to guide your rates. You may benefit by offering the client to choose from both a per-image rate, or a package flat rate that is based on days worked (assume ten hour work days).

Dgital Photography School is great, Lightstalking.com is another good one. I'd suggest studying on composition first, then work on mastering exposure. Bryan Peterson has written arguably the best book ever on exposure (all of his stuff is worth looking at) and this series by Scott Kelby can really accelerate the learning process, there is a lot of good information in there not directly related to operating your camera that you otherwise would only learn after years of experience.

I see a lot of talk about getting a 17-55mm f/2.8 but you might want to also consider the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8. I value the slight telephoto a little bit more than I do the 18mm wide end, so it ended up being my most recent purchase and I love it.

I also own the 50mm f/1.8 (albeit Nikon) and it remains my favorite lens ever, but that's because I do mostly portraiture sessions.

What kind of shooting do you want to do?

A good start would be a Vivitar 283 or 285.

They are good versatile flashes what have a form of built-in exposure calculation.

The Pentax K1000 is awesome, I miss mine. Built like a hockey puck and dumb as a rock. Excellent camera for learning manual exposure.

"Bad" light can often make for a great photo. pantsthatlast just posted this one, asking how to achieve this effect. From a basic rules standpoint, the photographer is doing things "wrong," eg. shooting into the sun. The image is overexposed, blowing out the sky and washing out the ground, but allowing you to see the subject. (If "properly" exposed, he'd be very dark.)

As always, I highly recommend the excellent book, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. I got a copy on eBay for $7, shipped.

Get a soft box diffuser for your flash like this one. If you get a mounted flash (which most recommend), something like this will work well. I have the second one and it's great.

I suggest the 35mm 1.8DX. It's got a built-in focus motor, light weight, and included lens hood. It's much faster than the kit lens, approximates a 50mm (the standard normal prime for a film SLR) and costs only $200 brand new.

It'll allow you to shoot in much lower-light environments, focus closer and encourage you to get more creative with your composition by forcing you to a fixed focal length.

You may never need your zoom again.

Edit: I was recommending this as your "every day" lens. It's not going to give you the zoom you need for wildlife, however I'm extremely pleased with this as a "walking around" lens and for casual portraits and group shots. To get a sense, for the focal length, twist your zoom lens to the "35" marker and leave it there.

I have the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 and love it. By far the sharpest lens I own, and this is counting it against the 24-70 f2.8, 24-105 f4, and 70-200 f2.8 that I have.

But supposedly, the 85 f/1.4 is even more stunning.

And of course the beast of the Sigma lineup is this baby: http://www.amazon.com/Sigma-200-500mm-Ultra-Telephoto-Nikon-Cameras/dp/B0013DAPNU

A good friend of mine recommended Skin by Lee Varis. Mind = blown.

I recently bought this kit from Amazon for £120 or so.

The quality isn't 100% great, but that doesn't matter as each individual part could be upgraded separately. (I had an external Speedlite flash already which I use to trigger them both.)

I'm very happy with them, getting results like this - NSFW which I simply couldn't have managed previously.

Well, there's the Canon 17-55 f/2.8. It's only a little bit wider, but quite a bit faster and a lot better built than the 18-55. It's not cheap though.
Or you could go off-brand and look at either the Sigma 18-50 or the Tamron 17-50

I like using this site to find some examples taken using a specific lens.
http://www.flickriver.com/lenses/

I have a Canon 100mm macro and use a cheap led ring light with it and have been surprised what a cheap ring light can do. This was taken at night with the above setup on my 50D.

I agree it was 15 in Massachusetts this morning. I was just looking at this one

The photographer's eye.

Not bad for illustrating the basic "rules" of composition

skin