When it comes to buying a camera, most of us fall into one of the following categories:

• Professionals who own a camera
• Enthusiasts who own a camera
• Beginners who are thinking of upgrading their camera or buying one for the first time.

Assuming you are interested in shooting stock, this page is geared towards helping the beginner make the best choice when deciding which camera to buy. There are plenty of in depth reviews and more helpful guidelines on buying a new camera elsewhere on the internet, but few of these camera reviews explain how the limitations of various cameras will have a negative impact upon stock photography. If you are a beginner or a casual photographer, and you are thinking about buying a new camera, read on.

Stock photography is about utilising your camera to create high quality photos, and then selling those photos (usually via agencies) to designers and publishers who expect the images they are buying will be of a high quality. But before you can sell any of the photos you took with your camera, each of them will need need to be approved in turn by reviewers who work for the stock photography agencies. If your camera doesnt perform well (for one of a dozen possible reasons) then you are likely to find yourself wishing you had invested in a more expensive camera to begin with. You may find a large number of your photos (possibly all of them) will be rejected if the quality of the images is not up to scratch, depending on the camera you buy.

I couldn't possibly attempt to review all the cameras on the market today, nor would I want to. Canon is popular amongst the professionals - so is Nikon. But there is one very obvious rule of thumb which beginners should bear in mind when buying a new camera:

As a stock photographer, the more expensive your camera, the less post processing work you will have to do, and the greater the number of your photos will be approved. If too many of your images are rejected, some sites may penalise you, either by limiting the number of photos you can upload, or by suspending your account and forcing you to apply for the privaleged status of a contributer again.

Of course there are slightly cheaper cameras which outperform slightly more expensive cameras, and visa versa. But for every $100 you save in purchasing a cheaper camera, you create that much more extra work for yourself. If you are on a budget, and "could have raised the money" for a more expensive camera, then in buying a cheap one it is certainly fair to say that if you are serious about stock photography, you will regret buying a cheaper camera over a more expensive model.

You might not do too badly with a Canon PowerShot G7, but you would do even better to buy yourself a proper SLR, even an entry level model like the Canon EOS 400D Digital Rebel. That said, I know people who can just about manage taking stock photos with the Canon S3 IS. The S3 is a far cheaper camera ($500 launch price) but a considerable amount of extra work needs to be done in photoshop to bring the images it takes up to an acceptable standard in order to get submissions approved, and in speaking to people, Ive learnt that although its possible to use this camera to shoot stock, consistency with this model seems to be poor.

If you have the money, then I would recommend buying at least a Canon 30D / Nikon D200, or better. SLR cameras have larger sensors than their cheaper "point and shoot" counterparts, and will take higher quality photos producing less noise, as well as allowing the photographer to do more creative work. If you are buying a cheap camera, ensure the model you buy does not have an in-camera "noise reduction" function. Or at least ensure that it can be turned off. You can read more about noise here.

In todays microstock photography marketplace, one can still get away with using a 4mp - 5mp camera. But the submission requirements are slowly changing, and even a few of the microstock sites now require you to use an 8mp camera, or higher. With an 8mp requirement, even the smallest amount of cropping means you would in theory need a 10mp camera, or higher! As the market becomes ever more flooded with more photographers and stock photos, and the gaps close even further between traditional stock photography VS micro stock photography, these requirements will eventually increase. If I had to put a figure on it, I would recommend at least a 10mp camera. Your stock photos are not going to grow new pixels by themselves at night, and you want them to remain attractive to buyers for as long as possible, as some sites have search functionality which allows designers to search for images they want to buy based on keywords as well as the size of the photos. Upsizing your photos is usually a big no-no. Some micro stock agencies will suspend your account if they catch you upsizing your photos.

And so, unsurprisingly, Im going to recommend that you would probably do best to buy the most expensive camera you can afford, and that you really should should avoid trying to get away with a cheaper or "lesser" camera. At the end of the day not only are you up against every other stock photographer in your quest to sell photos, but you are up against your own camera too, and its limitations. Unlike photography as an artform, pretty pictures are worthless in stock photography unless they are technically good, and of the required amount of megapixels.

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My final thoughts, looking to the future again, are thus: Many photographers of the "non stock variaty" comment that one does not need, nor would one ever need a camera with more than 8mp. 8mp will suffice, and 8mp is more than enough to blow up images to A3 in size.

In a very short space of time, a new wave of "microstock" photographers has emerged, carved a niche in the market, and already many of the top best selling micro stock photos are as good as the best traditional stock photos available from traditional stock agencies. I believe in microstock, and I believe it has a future. In 15 years, when buyers perform a search for "green pepper" or "business" they will get HUGE numbers of matching results. And rather than the first few pages containing best most eye catching images, the first few dozen (or hundred) pages will all contain stunning works of art. And so, it is probable that by then, perhaps most if not all of the micro stock sites will give buyers this extra control, implementing criteria which enables them to refine their searches by keyword and also by image size, allowing them to eliminate all but the best and highest quality photos from their searches.

Manufacturers will always continue to work at finding new ways to improve the cameras they sell, forever trying to release a better product than the competition, staggering the release of new features as much as posible to keep buyers coming back for more. In the not too distant future, many of us will be using 20-40 megapixel cameras. A 40 megapixel camera will allow a printer to produce a poster, billboard, or commercial print which is physically twice the size of a 10 megapixel camera at the same DPI resolution. (In order to double the size of a print and maintain the same pixel density, one needs to double the width and also double the height, hence the need for 4 time more megapixels to double the print size).

In order to protect your investment, and the salability of your photos in the decades to come, it is probably safe to say that yes, one should look towards buying a camera with as many megapixels as possible. That advice: "buy the most megapixels, more is better" is usually redundant, and usually comes bottom of the list when buying an digital SLR for non commercial use. 8 megapixels is plenty for all sizes of consumer print, but more megapixels is better for stock. It might be the commercial market which eventually helps push the boundaries further in the "mega pixel war" which in the minds of some, has already finished.

It will be a long time though, before most SLR's have 20-40 megapixels, due in part to the expense of manufacturing large sensors. Seitz have already developed a 160 million pixel camera, which products 7,500 pixels vertically and 21,250 pixels horizontally. It may be a while before this technology makes its way onto the camera phone, though :)