My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Photography. Cost of a used high quality DSLR + batteries + storage cards + cheap tripod = $500-ish. Lessons = free thanks to piracy and YouTube.
Then in a few years you’ll be gassing for those 3k lenses a 5k camera and a carbon fibre tripod, a few flashguns etc.
I’ve been in it for 10 years now and I largely use the same gear. My camera is 16 years old and my lens is about 12 years old. I use a Neewer tripod and sometimes swap lenses with someone I know who has a nice 70-200 mm.
Last year I went from a 10 year old Nikon D7100 with 17-55 f/2.8 to a Nikon Z6 with 24-70 f/4 and holy moly there is an insane difference in quality. I was absolutely blown away. If you can afford it I highly recommend getting something newer. It really breathed fresh air in to my photography and got me excited that I can get really sharp photos, even at high ISOs with good tracking.
I have access to a higher end DSLR if I want, I just prefer using an older camera. It gets boring when the camera does 99% of the work and puts out an image so clean it’s almost sterile. Until my camera breaks, I’ll keep using it.
Sigma has this beauty for only 26 grand.
You can definitely spend money on the stuff that’s for actual professionals who need every shot to count, but you can get really good stuff that just misses more shots or has some more quirks at much more reasonable prices, especially used. I’ve still spent probably a little over a grand on the stuff I use regularly (unless you count $400 more on a DJI Action 4 to play with throwing in water), but I also have some lenses that I got for free (they were throw-ins on someone else’s goodwill order that they didn’t have a use for) that really aren’t bad.
Its so much fun! I buy used SLR cameras and equipment from estate sales on the cheap (always below $30) and develop my film at home instead of paying $10 a roll to have it processed in a lab (chemicals cost $24 for 24 rolls of developing ) about to start bulk rolling my film for the cost of $6 a roll as opposed to spending $10-$16 per roll from the photography shop near me. Brining the cost down to shoot and develop the film from $26 per roll to $7 per roll.