Gallery photo: The street in the West End of Johnstown near Bottle Works. This is one of my favorite photos that I've taken with a smart phone (Samsung Galaxy J1). 

Starting out in photography today can be a daunting task with all of the different equipment that is available to photographers at different price ranges. Today, I’m going to focus on the more basic items that a beginning photographer should have in their collection, but can also be had at a relatively low price.

For this article, I’m gonna focus on smartphone photographers. In the gallery above, you will see a set of photos that I have taken with smartphones, just to show what can be done with a simple smart phone. 

Part One: Phone Photographers

This is the category where most beginning photographers should probably fit. When you first start out in photography, there is no need to go out and spend several hundred dollars on a specialized camera when you already have a pretty powerful camera just sitting in your pocket-your smartphone

Tripod-A tripod is a must-have for any photographer, especially one who will be taking any kind of landscape shots, and cell phone tripods can be had for very cheap prices. For the purpose of this list, we’re gonna go with one of the cheapest options, which will work for keeping your phone stable for a photo, but won’t cost a lot of money. You can buy this tripod for under fifteen dollars at: https://www.amazon.com/Acuvar-Aluminum-Camera-Universal-Smartphone/dp/B00SHJPMEU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1493300911&sr=8-3&keywords=smartphone+tripod. Price: $13.95

Add-on Lens: If you’re gonna get some interesting angles in your photos without using the digital zoom on your camera or some weird camera app, you need some lenses that can be added onto the camera on your phone. You can find these lenses at:https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=high+quality+smartphone+lens&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ahigh+quality+smartphone+lens.

A remote shutter release- This one may not be absolutely necessary to have with you or even to own, as most phones have the ability to simply set a timer, but it can still be helpful to have a remote that can fire your camera without touching it, especially when doing long exposure photography, as not touching the camera means less vibrations.

So, for the smartphone portion of this article, we managed to keep our budget pretty low, thus leaving room to upgrade your equipment and maybe save up some money to move up in the future and get an actual camera. That article will be posted soon.