to IIS Greg.
General recommendation for beginners is to get a DOB, biggest you can afford/manage. Not that I followed this path, but you can learn from my mistakes
Also if you don't have binoculars suggest you look at getting some, lots of threads on this topic already.
Astrophotography is a different beast altogether if you are serious about it. While you can put a camera on just about any scope the requirements for AP and visual are generaly different. In fact the requirements for AP vary depending on your interests. To eliminate some of your confusion I suggest you put AP aside for now and buy for visual.
You have a better budget than most looking for a first scope so you should be able to find something nice and be able to get some extras, but you may want to just keep some aside til you work out what you really want.