A Word (or Two) About Our Product Reviews
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It takes a long time to have some humility about what you really know.”— Scott Adams
While the focus of most of our blog posts is on technique, that is actually using mirrorless cameras and lenses to make photographs, it’s inevitable that we will, from time to time, include product reviews. Mark always says he “doesn’t do reviews” and that’s really true for the rest of us as well. Because we try to keep everything on this blog short and easy-to-read, our impressions are brief but you should get a sense of what we like or don’t like about a product and sometimes we don’t always agree.
Heck, sometimes we write about off-the-beaten track gear such as the beautiful, inexpensive Helios lens Mark wrote about recently. As I’ve often mentioned, new stuff inspires me to make pictures and maybe its the Helios or a Skink pinhole lens, these are products that aren’t normally written about but are so much fun to use that Mark and I want to share the joy we had with this gear.
Speaking for myself: All of my equipment listed on the Gear page was purchased with my own money. When companies lend us gear, such as the GX8 (that I wasn’t all that crazy about) it is returned to them after a specified loan period. There are no freebies. That’s why a lot of my gear, such as my Olympus EM-5 Mark I, is purchased after the new model came out. It’s cheaper that way.
Another thing to keep in mind that our reviews (such as they are) are not product endorsements. We never say you should buy a product because we think it’s great. Nope, that’s not how it works. What we are saying is that this product is interesting because… But you are on your own about making a purchase. Yes, purchase links are provided in posts because operating this blog is not free.
But we are not beholden to the advertisers you see either. They do not even begin to cover the cost of keeping this blog running. Mirrorless Photo Tips is a labor of love for Mark and I and our other writers, including Jamie Zartman and Barry Staver. We do it because we love photography and dearly love mirrorless photography because it has freed us from the shackles of big, heavy and bulky cameras and lets us focus on making picture—a novel concept, eh?
