Finally! I have started the For Photographers series! To be honest the reason why I didn’t start a month ago was because I left my iPad with ALL of my posts for Photographers in the notes section. So, I had to wait for it to be sent to our friends in Kenya, have one of their friends come to the US, and have my awesome father go pick it up in West Virginia (I was out of town, and my dad wanted to go on a motorbike ride through WV, so it worked out..). Look out for the For Photographers on Wednesdays from now on…

Alright guys, the photographers age-old question. Nikon or Canon? Before you read any further, listen to this amazing song. This should be reason enough to be a Nikon photographer (but I’ll give you even more…).

I have been using Nikon since I started my photography education back in high school, and in college I spent my days and nights with my trusty ol’ Nikon D80. My first cameras were my father’s that I used throughout my education and what I started using for our first few weddings as well. My father had been an aspiring photographer for a while, growing up around his father who bought several cameras that he would seldom use, and just collect (some of them i get to play with now!). My father on the other hand took photos and video every time he went somewhere new with work or we went somewhere new together as a family, and traveling around Kenya meant imagery EVERYWHERE! Now I do both; collect and snap all the time. Seriously, just from my time at VCU, I have several binders full of film negatives, and digital contact sheets with images I photographed. As you would expect, I became quite familiar with Nikon’s menu setup, button placement, and controls. When Laura and I started photographing weddings, and she needed a camera of her own, it just made sense for us to continue with Nikon; something that I knew inside and out, literally.

It was an obvious choice for us to continue with Nikon because the biggest differences between Nikon and Canon are mostly personal preferences in the camera’s button placement, quick controls, and menu layout, not it’s sensor, capabilities, or professional ability. Of course being the top two companies in the professional photography realm means that people are constantly comparing the smallest of differences between them. Neither stand out enough to validate a switch from one to the other, especially once you have already committed thousands of dollars to one brand. However,  here’s a few of my favorite features that stand out to me in the Nikon brand.

1. Nikon are relatively new, only 60 years old; one huge benefit of this is almost all of their SLR and DSLR lenses have the same mount, meaning you can put just about any lens on any camera body, digital or not!
2. Nikon lenses are all made of the same professional quality: Canon has a tiered system for their lenses, meaning their lens quality and construction ranges. This quality is the actual material made with it’s lenses, not the quality of the image. There are obviously better lenses in Nikon’s range, but they are all made out of the same high quality materials.
3. Nikon is black and yellow; LETS GO VCU!