If you’ve read several of the reviews here, you might get the impression that I’m being paid off by the manufacturers to write glowing reviews. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. That said, my reviews do tend to be positive more often than not; in science, they call this selection bias.

I buy what I Review and I use It

While I’d like nothing more than for companies to just give me things, reality always gets in the way of that dream. As such, most things I review here have been purchased by me — and when they aren’t I’ll call it out at the start of the review.

More importantly, I don’t purchase things just to review. I purchase things for and to improve my photography, the review comes later.

Moreover, before I buy something, I research the heck out of what I’m buying. In fact, if you’re reading a review here, odds are that’s what you’re doing too. This is the primary reason that I don’t have a lot of negative reviews. Simply put, I don’t have enough money to waste it on things that don’t work or that I can’t use.

That said, I’m always open to accepting products to review; if you’re a manufacturer and you’re interested in me reviewing some product that you manufacture, you can contact me though my contact page (use the product review request category). Though understand up front, I won’t trade my editorial freedom for a free widget.

In my World, a Duck is not just a Duck…

…it’s specifically a male Blue-winged Teal.

What I mean is two fold.

First I’m going to call things the way I see them. I can’t stand reviews that beat around the bush, or worse, are obviously contradictory.

When I read something like, “The images were soft, the lens was clunky, there was noticeable CA,” then turn around at the end of the review and say “This is a great lens” or worse “This is a great lens for the money.” I have to ask, if there were so many problems and virtually nothing in the review that was redeeming, why say the lens was good at all?

Secondly, I try very hard to insure that I actually know what I’m talking about when I get off on a technical tangent, or that I’ve isolated specific things I’m testing in my tests. Almost more frustratingly to me than vague and contradictory reviews are ones that draw conclusions from poorly designed testing or demonstrate a lack of understanding of the technical details or physics involved, yet make a recommendation based on those conclusions.

For example, when testing a lens’s resolution the target, lens and sensor must all be perfectly aligned and a exposure must be such that it mitigates or removes any effects from mirror slap, shutter motion so that you’re only seeing resolution and not vibration effects.

I would argue that if you can’t maintain some form of rigor in your testing, you’re best off not commenting about that metric to any significant level. I try and live by this in my reviews as well, and will cite sources if I draw on them for a more technical point than I can test myself.

Changing Technology and Capabilities

The state of the art is always advancing, and in some cases that means revisiting older reviews and updating them with new comments and perspectives. Ultimately this means that my reviews aren’t 100% static, and are subject to changes as time, technology, and my capabilities to test things progress.

Remember, almost all of the gear I review is gear I use in the normal course of my photography. When things change, such as when I get a new camera, I have to retest things to insure that I know how my gear will preform under these new circumstances.

For example, when I first started reviewing lenses, video wasn’t a concern for me; now it is. As a result, I’ve been going back and revisiting my older lens reviews and updating them to include some information about the performance of the lens on video-centric features like breathing and parfocal performance.

In any event, there are some things I simply can’t do as well as someone with a considerably bigger budget. As a result you’ll find at least as of 2012 that my camera reviews focus on things like ergonomics and usability instead of technical minutia like color response and dynamic range. Likewise to properly test a lens’s resolution require a considerably expensive test bench and software. Moreover, to even make a meaningful statement about resolution one needs to test a significant number of lenses to assess whether their sample’s performance is typical or an outlier.

When it comes to those minutia, DXOMark, The Digital Picture, SLR Gear, and DPReview do a very good job characterizing a lens sample; likewise Rodger from LensRental.com’s blog does a very good job characterizing a large sample of lenses though not as in depth.

Updates and Revisions

I really do try to have a full and clear idea about what I’m talking about before I sit down to write a review. For example, I spend more than a year shooting with my EOS 1D before I was comfortable enough to sit down and really start talking about the hardware and user interface. It’s not that I could talk about the camera long before that, but I didn’t feel I really appreciated and understood the nuances well enough to have sound complaints.

Unfortunately as much as I’d like to pretend that opinions and understanding doesn’t change, and that I’ve adequately prepared myself before I sit down and write, the simple reality is that that’s not really true. Many points conspire to change my opinions of a product over time.

Minor nits, can become much more annoying problems. Often, even though I’ve spent a lot of time using the item in question, I may not even fully realize that something is a problem or annoyance at the time. Then at some time in the future, along comes a competing product that does the same thing differently that really underscores the frustrations that minor nit can be.

Likewise, changes in my style of shooting and my understanding of the craft, can very easily reveal flaws in my initial analysis.

In short, I reserve the right to update and revise my reviews in the future as I see fit.