3 ms·

Be aware, Ken Rockwell is kind of a joke [0] in photographic circles. [0]: http://anotherangle.eu/posts/why-ken-rockwell-is-bad-for-photography/ http://another

by iaml 10y ago

Be aware, Ken Rockwell is kind of a joke [0] in photographic circles. [0]: http://anotherangle.eu/posts/why-ken-rockwell-is-bad-for-photography/ http://anotherangle.eu/posts/why-ken-rockwell-is-bad-for-pho...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
foldr 10y ago
It's fashionable to hate on him, but a lot of his advice is very good. The blog post you link to is quite silly and petty, honestly. A lot of people don't like to be told that their $5000 equipment is only slightly superior in terms of image quality to much cheaper equipment, but it's true.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  As a whole, I've found photography is a very petty niche, populated with many self-important prima donnas. I think it's really easy to make something that appears to be a "good picture", so practically everyone feels like a photographic expert whose authority on the niche should be respected. This is amplified in photography because it's very hard to make a living in it, and a lot of people feel jealous and resentful to the few who are able to do so. There's also a common impulse in all niches to hate on whoever is popular and attracting a lot of newbies. Rockwell certainly does that. While there are certainly things that even relatively-inexperienced photographers can find to disagree with Rockwell about, there is no doubt that his web site is useful and informative, especially as introductory material.
- LeonidasXIV 10y ago
  The point is that he just tells you everything is amazing and to please buy it from Amazon so he can support his ever growing family. And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good. And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    He doesn't tell you everything is amazing. He usually seems skeptical, IMO, which is what one would expect from an old-timer in any profession (wish there was a little more of it in tech). Tells you that L lenses are nice, but he buys and uses non-L because it works equally fine for him (and yes, I know he primarily appears to use Nikon anyway :P). Says this about most expensive things. I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance (not necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious. Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
    > he just tells you everything is amazing You can't even pretend that's true. Pretty much every new Nikon camera body review he puts out is a long list of 'this is exactly the same', interspersed with 'these useless numbers are bigger'. The only recommendations I think he's given in the past 5 or so years is the D600, D7X00 for crop, and the D750 when that came out. Hell, in the reviews for later versions of a camera, he usually recommends to get an older model used. And for newbies, it's always the base model. His monetization strategy is straightforward and transparent. FWIW, I agree it's not a great place to point newbies, but the cynical/shill angle is too far.
- ptero 10y ago
  A lot of his advice is good a lot is bad and one needs to know quite a bit to distinguish one from the other. IMO not a very useful site.
coldtea 10y ago
Those photographic circles are kind of a joke (pixel-peepers, measurebators, etc) in themselves.
cookiecaper 10y ago
The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable. It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear. He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1] His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs. Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times. The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences. There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here. [0]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm [1]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm

by iaml 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

foldr 10y ago

It's fashionable to hate on him, but a lot of his advice is very good. The blog post you link to is quite silly and petty, honestly. A lot of people don't like to be told that their $5000 equipment is only slightly superior in terms of image quality to much cheaper equipment, but it's true.

cookiecaper 10y ago
As a whole, I've found photography is a very petty niche, populated with many self-important prima donnas. I think it's really easy to make something that appears to be a "good picture", so practically everyone feels like a photographic expert whose authority on the niche should be respected. This is amplified in photography because it's very hard to make a living in it, and a lot of people feel jealous and resentful to the few who are able to do so. There's also a common impulse in all niches to hate on whoever is popular and attracting a lot of newbies. Rockwell certainly does that. While there are certainly things that even relatively-inexperienced photographers can find to disagree with Rockwell about, there is no doubt that his web site is useful and informative, especially as introductory material.
LeonidasXIV 10y ago
The point is that he just tells you everything is amazing and to please buy it from Amazon so he can support his ever growing family. And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good. And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  He doesn't tell you everything is amazing. He usually seems skeptical, IMO, which is what one would expect from an old-timer in any profession (wish there was a little more of it in tech). Tells you that L lenses are nice, but he buys and uses non-L because it works equally fine for him (and yes, I know he primarily appears to use Nikon anyway :P). Says this about most expensive things. I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance (not necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious. Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
  > he just tells you everything is amazing You can't even pretend that's true. Pretty much every new Nikon camera body review he puts out is a long list of 'this is exactly the same', interspersed with 'these useless numbers are bigger'. The only recommendations I think he's given in the past 5 or so years is the D600, D7X00 for crop, and the D750 when that came out. Hell, in the reviews for later versions of a camera, he usually recommends to get an older model used. And for newbies, it's always the base model. His monetization strategy is straightforward and transparent. FWIW, I agree it's not a great place to point newbies, but the cynical/shill angle is too far.
ptero 10y ago
A lot of his advice is good a lot is bad and one needs to know quite a bit to distinguish one from the other. IMO not a very useful site.

coldtea 10y ago

Those photographic circles are kind of a joke (pixel-peepers, measurebators, etc) in themselves.

cookiecaper 10y ago

The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable. It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear. He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1] His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs. Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times. The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences. There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here. [0]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm [1]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm