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About Me
and CameraHobby For some reason, people seem interested in who I am and why I do what I do, so here you are:
I occasionally do some commercial and event/wedding photography, but do not be fooled by this blatant grasp for credibility, as the money I make doing photography amounts to a spit in the ocean compared to how much I’ve spent pursuing this maddening hobby. Truth is, I earn more money writing about photography for this web site than I do actually doing photography, but that’s fine because I pursue photography for myself. In seeking the experience and knowledge that one desires when pursuing a vocation close to one’s heart, I have perused through many of the best and largest Internet resources available to me when I started back in 1997. I also bought many books and subscribed to many magazines in pursuit of photographic knowledge, with nary a formal course or class work, although I did do some photography and darkroom work as a senior back in high school and had photos printed in the school paper and yearbook. Other than that, the closest I’ve been to a photography class was the two-day Nikon School put on by Larry Frank when he still worked for Nikon Canada.
I took his advice to heart and although I had little to really give in the beginning, I published what I had and could back in June 1999. It started oh so humbly with a small but usable 11 MB of server space via Netscape, followed by a sizeable 50 MB at 50megs.com. However, within a year I grew weary of banner ads and the limitations of free HTML editors. It was time to get serious in self-publishing. In 2000 CameraHobby.com was born and through various incarnations and designs, has grown to be what it is now. As I learned more about how to edit a web site, I applied it to CameraHobby, but it still reflects some personal objectives and biases I have.
While I enjoy seeing my web site become successful and like to brag about stats as much as the next person, after a certain point it doesn’t mean much since I don’t have any specific sponsors or advertisers worried about how many visitors, hits, or page views the site receives. CameraHobby has already been a victim of its own success due to the amount of bandwidth it goes through, and while some generous people have offered to make donations, personal pride have seen me decline such offers. I’d rather see my articles and reviews spread out and posted elsewhere than to have to put a button on my site saying “Donate to the CameraHobby charity.” I’ve had people suggest that I would make a good professional reviewer, but I don’t think so because I think whatever copy I send in would be sliced and diced to meet the limited space of a magazine. A web site allows one to write as much as needed to satisfy one’s personal requirements for reviewing. Unfortunately, you will have to put up with my design parameters for those reviews and articles J
Publish an honest review of a piece of stinko and stinko company pulls their advertising resulting in a loss of revenue. Publishing is a business and you don’t stay in business without advertising revenue. For a small guy like me, I have more flexibility, as there are no specific sponsors or advertisers beyond the Google ads running down the right side of the pages. There is no one to offend per se, but of course that won’t stop stinko company from taking exception to your tepid opinion of their product. And of course, if you write brutally honest reviews, well you’re not likely to be receiving any more review samples or requests. For me, I don’t receive so many offers that I’ll have to worry about doing a John Kerry “nuancing” my reviews or articles. While one cannot avoid receiving “free” evaluation software in order to write such reviews, hardware is a different matter and I don’t receive free samples of such and decline when offered, as has already happened. I either purchase it if I can afford it, or return it to the vendor, thus I am quite comfortable in stating that I have never received material consideration for the reviews I write. The vast majority of the reviews and articles are about items that I own, or that have been loaned to me by friends willing to put up with my begging. My approach to reviewing is to explain why it is that I chose the product (or would or would not choose). This often results in background information first about the product and what led me to it followed by my decision making process to compare it to other similar products and what ultimately led to decide on the specific product at hand. Afterwards I run through some basic tests to see if it met my expectations and what I like or do not like about it. Then a wrap-up and conclusion follows. Sometimes I make recommendations and sometimes those recommendations are qualified as "highly," or just "recommended." Here's a very general guide to my subjective recommendations:
That’s basically it. Depending on whether my review is one of the first ones to be posted (usually not) or if it lags behind other reviews already posted, will determine the level of detail I provide. While it’s nice to be among the first reviews posted, being a late reviewer can offer some benefits too, as one has the research already undertaken by the first reviewers and one can do a summary of all the key points. The downside is that by the time you post a late review, much of it is already conventional wisdom. That in essence is my mission statement, if you can call it that. I do not claim perfection, but I will write an honest, real world review based upon the knowledge and experience I have accumulated to date.
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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My
name is
By
1999, I thought I could add to the body of knowledge by self-publishing
on the Internet. Delusions of self-grandeur are attributed to the influences
of Philip Greenspun of Photo.net fame, who, in a very direct fashion,
stated that if you want to express yourself to the greatest number of
people in the most cost effective manner, you have to publish via the
Internet, because the old school, dead-trees publishers aren’t going
to take notice of you.
About
Reviewing and Writing
Occasionally,
somebody will offer me a review sample of equipment or software to try
out in the hopes of a favorable review to be posted and causing a surge
in hits to the person’s or company’s web site. When I was just a reader
of reviews I wondered why there weren’t more negative reviews published,
but then you learn that magazines and many sponsored web sites are beholden
to advertising revenue from the same companies that provide review samples.
