Poll: First accessory to buy

[Kayaker72]

If the lens is worth protecting, it probably came with a hood. Put it in the "use" position rather than the "stow" position, and that's your sacrificial element should something happen. Save the filter for adverse environments. See http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011...th-bad-filters for why I'm recommending against using a filter 24/7.

This is all personal preference. My preference is to have a filter on the front of my lens for protection. I do take it off for certain shots. But I walk through too much brush, crawl around too many rocks and have too many nieces and nephews that like to grab my camera for me to not have a filter. I tend to go with all three levels of protection: lens filter, lens hood and lens cap. It blows my mind, but I know photographers that don't do any of the three and apparently their gear holds up just fine. Just one of those things, you could go through your entire life and never need a seatbelt. I still wear mine.

Roger did make note that the issue was with cheap/bad filters and not with good filters. In fact, based on the second paragraph of the link, I've always assumed that Lensrentals sends their lenses out with good filters installed. While there is an impact to stacking 5 good filters, no one does that. While this is a bit dated at this point, lenstip.com reviewed a number of UV filters and provides photos with and without a single filter.

Also, how valuable a lens has to be to justify a filter is also personal preference, but a few that I'd buy a filter for that do not come with hoods include the EFS 17-55, EFS 15-85, and EFS 10-22. At one point I owned the EFS 15-85 and EFS 10-22. I bought both lens hoods and filters for both.

[Allen Leuken]

Accessories depends on Photograpghy. What type of photography you do?

There are many accessories of camera includes
Lense
backpack
Camera bag
Tripod
Camera strap
Memory card
Many other....

[Jayson]

I would say it all depends on what you plan on shooting. If you plan on taking pictures of landscapes and outdoor stuff, I would buy a tripod. If you purchased your camera to take pictures of your kids or something like that, I would get the flash first. Getting an external drive would be a very close second. I had a failure of my hard drive shortly after I started taking taking photos of my first born and didn't have a backup solution. Luckily I had a ton of memory cards and wasn't deleting stuff of them but rather just switching them out until they became full. I luckily didn't loose anything of value in the failure but learned the lesson about having backups.

[peety3]

If it's your first DSLR, you might not realize how important having a stable platform can improve your pictures, so I'd argue that the tripod can be educational for most any type of shooter. Those who know they don't need one probably do need one but refuse to accept the reality.

I second the external hard disk notion. I have two 2TB drives with photo archives on them (lately we kill about 1TB/year). I rsync the drives to a set kept at my office in another zip code, a set kept at my parents' house in another state, and a third set used to rotate out the other two. I'm working on developing a way to online-backup the stuff that hasn't been rsynced to offsite...haven't quite ironed out the kinks there. And yes, I keep EVERYTHING in RAW. I never delete in-camera, and never delete after ranking in Lightroom. That's just how I roll. There's a great story out there about a photographer who had a magnificent shot of Monica Lewinsky staring at Bill Clinton, and because TIME kept everything for him, he was able to dig through and find the shot, and publish it.