Best Amazon Purchases of 2024 – Photography Edition

Throughout every year, photographers make a lot of purchases to upgrade their equipment, change up their looks for sessions, and add to their inventory to keep client looks different from their previous years and seasons. Depending on your style and how you spread out your looks, this can lead to a lot of purchases throughout the year. This year, we made several purchases that were absolute game changers for us, and some that were great for their purpose, and some that were just ok or ended up being returned because they just weren’t that useful. This list is for our best Amazon purchases for 2024, with a focus on photography purchases.

Throughout this list, we focused solely on the items that we felt were useful and purposeful for making our business better. This was a big year for building our business in terms of equipment upgrades and building up our inventory for future years. This led to a lot of purchases from several different locations and a vast array of different types of items.

This article contains Amazon affiliate links that give a portion of your purchase back to us. These rewards payments are for for us small businesses to continue growing as a company and ensuring our clients get the best possible experience for their sessions.

We upgraded our D750 to the new mirrorless body Z8 this year and, oh man, was it an incredible purchase! This body is fast, has a high megapixel count, has great autofocus in dark environments, and is overall an amazing body for photography. Highly recommend!

With Nikon, your normal DSLR NIKKOR lens won’t connect to mirrorless camera bodies like the Z8. Unless you’re looking to upgrade all of your current lens to Z-series lenses, which can be very expensive, you’ll want to get this FTZ II adapter. This will allow you use your new mirrorless camera with old style DSLR NIKKOR lenses with nearly zero quality loss. This is a must have if you are an already established photographer with several lenses in your inventory.

Since we purchased a new camera body with the Nikon Z8, we needed more batteries to last through all of our sessions. This battery pack, charger, and carrying case has paid off for us multiple times over when we run low on battery power and need to make a swap. It also doubles as a charger when you connect an item to the case that can be charged via USB. Lastly, it has additional memory card holders in the lid of the case for safekeeping. Definitely recommend!

With tripods, it can be difficult to turn your camera sideways and get vertical photos with the basic bottom of body attachment the tripod comes with. Because of the weight of the camera and lens, it tends to rotate downward and doesn’t allow the camera to stay where it needs to in order to get the images you need. This L Bracket gives a tripod attachment to side of the camera body and allows your camera to focus its full weight on the side instead of the bottom. This purchase was one of the best purchases we made this year! A definite recommend for high volume for vertical portraits like sports team and individual sessions.

In the past, we’ve only used those cheap tripods you can buy at Walmart or anywhere else. They’ve done alright for us, but they are build with low quality plastic that just can’t hold up in difficult environments and can’t be trusted with high-quality, expensive equipment. We went this one as a replacement and it’s been a great addition! It is a bit heavy, so not the best option for hiking or traveling, but for what we use it for it has been one of our best purchases this year. And it doubles as a monopod by unscrewing one of the legs, which has been very handy for some of our action sports sessions where we need to find different spots around a field and move around a lot. Highly recommend!

We’ve been working mostly off of our Macbook Pro for all things A2i Photography for the past couple years. The small screen and difficult calibration made it a challenge to edit quickly and accurately with high volume. We decided to upgrade to a monitor build for perfection, color matching, and high-quality with the BenQ. It was excellent choice and has been a addition to our inventory! Highly recommend!

About five years ago I used my first hybrid sit down/stand up desk and it changed the way I see desk work. Being able to stand up when and continue working when sitting just isn’t working gave a different user experience. This one has done us well for the purchase we needed it for. It is a non-expensive solution with great quality and space, which was perfect for our situation. Definitely recommend!

This year was a huge year for picking up off camera flash during our sessions. During our high school senior sessions and in-studio sessions (view examples here), we use off camera flashes for every one of them to ensure we don’t overexpose our backgrounds, but still keep our subjects in great lighting. The AD200 is our most travel friendly strobe as it’s the lightest and smallest, and has been more than helpful!

With new flashes comes new batteries! Amazon offers great deals on their battery sales, and a replacement battery for the AD200 is part of that. It’s been a great battery for usage during our longer sessions like sports team and individual sessions.

While the AD200 is great for travel and simplicity, sometimes you need something a bit more powerful. The AD400 comes with a punch and one of its most incredible attributes is its high speed sync option, which allows you to push your shutter speed much faster than 1/250 (the typical max speed for flash photography). This gives us a lot of leeway with bright environments during the daytime and still allowing perfectly exposed backgrounds with properly exposed subjects. This was a fantastic and extremely useful purchase for us!

Many years ago my Apple Watch Series 4 got washed away in the Arabian Gulf on a diving trip, and working in a job where I can’t have smart watches or cell phones kept me away from purchasing a new one. Now that I’m in a job where this is no longer a problem, I decided to go and get a one. I love this watch! It’s been a great addition has even pushed me a bit more in the physical fitness area with its fitness ring app. Definitely recommend getting one of these if you’re an Apple owner!

Some of the sports sessions we accomplish can last several hours, and ensuring your phone, batteries, and computer hold up is an important part of that. This power bank packs a punch with its battery size, built-in wired connections, solar panel charger, and flashlight. It’s come in and saved the day many times over and we couldn’t do what we do without it!

With new cameras comes new memory cards! With the upgrade from the D750 to the Z8, I can now use XQD or CFX memory cards, which are much faster than a traditional Sandisk. I also choose to use smaller sized memory cards instead of the large 1TB cards in the case that one of them fails. This way I can just swap it out with another smaller one and not be out $500, rather $150, and it won’t be as much of a burden to throw out once it’s busted. This one has done me well so far!

And with a memory card comes a new card reader to be able to upload the images from the memory card to the computer. This one has been great and it’s wicked fast! I can upload multiple GBs in seconds, where with my old style readers it would take several minutes to upload the same amount.

The Nikon Z8 has dual memory card slots with one being a CFX and one being a SanDisk. As a backup to the CFX card I use the SanDisk as a “just in case” if ever my main card breaks down on me in the middle of a session. These SanDisk’s are great and you usually find a great deal on them through Amazon if you’re patient and want to wait for discount.

When you’re doing an event or an a very active sporting event, it’s difficult to have just one camera and lens that fits all of your needs. Trying to carry around two cameras can be difficult because you’re always trying to set one on the floor or juggle it and risk dropping it. This harness allows you to quickly switch between cameras without the worry of dropping one of them or leaving one behind.