Where I get my news

Human nature and the realities of capital costs dictate that most fields of enterprise will have a handful of dominant competitors – be it arms makers, foodstuff manufacturers, clothiers or camera makers. Likewise, there is only one Wall Street Journal and only one Variety, the latter for the Hollywood set.

In photography, growing up in the UK, it was The Amateur Photographer. Sure there were others, but none was published weekly and none published as much of my work as AP did – so obviously I liked it! The closest the US ever got in print was Shutterbug, a magazine whose sycophantic ‘reviews’ of gear reflected nothing more than pandering to their advertisers. An abomination.

Given that print is dead – the next few years will see the New York Times, the WSJ and every major US and UK newspaper cease print publication – where does one go for photography news? For me it has long been DP review which brings with it British journalistic integrity (a concept foreign to US shores) and a no-punches-pulled style to its equipment reviews. Sure, the guys doing the reviews couldn’t take a picture if their lives depended on it, but we are talking test charts here, not the Vogue studios.

A perfect example of the quality of DPR’s work can be seen today in their interview with the big digital cheese at Panasonic. A couple of excerpts indicate just how insightful their work is:

Translation: Dummies. We downloaded what they knew about optics and now have left them behind owing to our vastly superior knowledge of digital processing. No need to pay these fellows royalties for their dated designs any more.

Translation: Yup, another thing we picked up from Leica. The M rangefinder was the most perfect body shape ever made for hand held use. We will make it better.

There are lots of other review sites out there but none compares to DPR for breadth and depth of objective reporting.

And when that M-Panny with a 35mm f/2 lens and a full frame sensor appears, you will have to get behind me in the line.