RE: 13 Year Old Girl's Intro To Photography...Her Dad Thinks She Is Great...
This is my specialty, helping people find cameras. :)
You DEFINITELY don't need to spend $3,000 unless you're wanting to get her the most expensive, most feature-packed option there is. I shoot weddings and I don't even have a camera that expensive. lol
So let's take a look. The below options can do full manual, full automatic, and everything in between:
Canon:
This is the brand I shoot, but I'm pro-Nikon as well. Canon is just the first one I put in my hand, and that's what I was sold on. Had I been given a Nikon to try out first, I probably would've chosen that. Ultimately, it's Chevy Vs. Ford here, so whichever one you pick is going to give you basically the same results as the other. Here's a Canon T5 kit with a camera body, 2 lenses, and a camera bag for $499. That's going to come with everything she'll need for a while. The point here is to get her started, and let her find the ceiling. She'll know when she's found the limitations to her setup and is ready to trade up. ;-)
Nikon:
Here's a similar setup in a Nikon for $546, so it's comparable. The lenses that come with it are similar, but the larger lens at 200mm in this kit doesn't do as much telephoto as the Canon kit at 300mm.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. :)
So you would go with Canon package? Because of the lenses? Although you prefer Nikon. Appreciate the help. What would your gut go with in regards to a 13 year old exploring this for the first time? Thank you again.
I'm not necessarily preferential to Nikon, I just know a lot of people are very all one and absolutely not the other, whichever those are. Ultimately they're just boxes that capture light, so they'll both do about the same job. But yeah, if I had to choose between these specific kits, I'd pick the Canon just because it's got a slightly stronger telephoto lens, which gives you a bit more zoom to get in close to far-away subjects. In this case with these cameras, a 300mm lens (which the Canon kit comes with) will pull something that's nearly 100ft away to make it seem like it's only 10 feet away. The lens the Nikon comes with does the same for something that's only about 65 ft away.
Another thing I noticed just now, however, is that the Canon is capable of producing 18 megapixel (or million pixel) images, whereas the Nikon does 24 megapixels. I also understand that the Nikon cameras these days produce images that aren't nearly as grainy (read: "noisy") as the Canon, so that means the Nikon might be able to produce images that are a bit cleaner, especially in darker scenes.