One of the best tools a freelance writer can own is a good digital camera. Supplying your own images for an article can make you more marketable, and any steady reader of this blog knows we are digital camera evangelists here. Writers who don’t take their own photos wind up cheating themselves out of the extra cash you often get for supplying images together with the story.

“Which camera should I buy?” Naturally this is the first question non-photographers always ask. There are two basic kinds of cameras; the point-and-shoot (P&S) variety and digital SLRs. SLR stands for “single lens reflex” and this basically means that what you see what you look in the viewfinder is the exact image the lens sees.

I strongly advise writers not to buy the cheap P&S model. For professional use, even as a beginner, P&S cameras are too limited and you will grow out of them as soon as you learn the difference between what an indoor shot with no flash looks like at 100 ISO vs. 800 ISO. What does THAT mean? We’ll save that for another article.

The important thing to know here is that you don’t need to drop $1200 on a camera yet. You can spend roughly half that and get a digital 8MP camera that will perform well for you, allow you to switch out lenses and experiment with different techniques and give you an excellent tool you can use for years or until you feel you are ready for the next level in digital photography.

One camera to consider is the Canon Digital Rebel XT. This is a great benchmark as a beginner camera, and Canon has traditionally performed well in low-light situations where many freelancers will find themselves needing that advantage. Are you a music journalist shooing bands playing in bars or clubs? Are you doing night shots using available light under street lamps or neon? The low light advantage is definitely a plus.

Use the Rebel as a starting point and do some research on other similarly-priced models. From there you will get an idea of the types of features you can expect to get in the $500 range. My contemporaries may frown on this, but I advise against buying digital cameras from eBay, especially used ones. My philosophy? You inherit somebody else’s problems when buying used camera gear. You don’t know if the camera weathered a dust storm in Arizona or a flood in Texas, high humidity in the Florida Everglades or was dropped off a scaffold in Paris. Buy new.

We’ll be carrying more photo advice for the budding writer/photographer in future articles, but for new, do some homework and be sure to check out websites such as Digital Photography Review to get user feedback, product reviews and very opinions on the latest models.