The goal with this site is to share gear related findings, discoveries and opinions. All gear I write about has been bought and used by me unless specifically noted.
I’ll generally take an approach of using the equipment in my normal way of shooting and base my conclusions on those experiences. At times I shoot more controlled tests, mostly to get to know a piece of kit as well as possible, but will only rarely post the complete test sets.
The different types of content of this site has slightly different purpose and thus my approach differ slightly for each.
The idea with the reviews is to write about gear that’s either not very common or where little information can be found elsewhere online. I will generally not review something just for the sake of doing it. When choosing to do a review I aim to offer as objective and comprehensive information as possible, with my personal opinions taking less space. It’ll still be me doing the review of course and to some extent everything will be based on my preferences, but the idea is to find a 80/20 split between objective/subjective information.
I won’t review equipment without shooting it extensively first. I want to have used it in many different situations and under different circumstances. I doubt I’ll review anything before using it a month or two, and preferably longer*.
* Every review I’ve posted as of April 2015 has been made after owning and shooting a lens for several years.
I will also keep updating the reviews for as long as I have and use the piece of equipment reviewed. If I shoot a lens on a new camera, find different behavior in a new shooting situation or make a new image that I feel works better in the article I will add to, remove from or otherwise update the review, usually without notice.
Editorials on the other hand will be more freeform. These articles will generally be shorter and focus more on my experiences or opinions on a piece of gear (or something else). The balance here will vary by topic, but will as a rule of thumb be opposite to the balance in the reviews – 20/80 objective/subjective. Here I will write both about rare and common gear. While I might update these articles over time, it will happen rarely compared to with the reviews.
Shorter updates with less research and effort put into them. Their purpose is to offer quick updates on what I’m working on, preliminary conclusions or just some nice images. Here less emphasis is placed on accuracy and research, more on speed and currentness. I’ll probably never update the notes.
The site is completely written, photographed, designed and produced by me – KJ Vogelius. You can get in touch with me the easiest through Twitter.
The site is marked up fully in HTML and doesn’t use a CMS. I use IA Writer to write the articles and then export them to HTML, adding images, links and styling manually.
Aside from the sharing of information, my goal has been to offer a gear site with high quality design. I’ve also wanted to keep image quality high – the images are generally large, with moderate compression leading to high viewing quality on all device types. As a result some pages are fairly heavy and might take a while to load. It’s a trade off – I’ve chosen quality over speed in this instance.
On recent versions of Mac OS X the headline font is DIN, a font used extensively by many manufacturers throughout the photographic history (e.g. Leica & Zeiss). I'm investigating options to load the font on other operating systems as well, but haven't found a good enough solution yet. For now the font stack falls back to Helvetica, another font used quite a bit by photographic manufacturers. The body copy is Times New Roman – a web safe font that's in my opinion been coming into its own in recent years for digital use due to increased screen quality in many devices.
All content, images etc are of course copyright.
This site is without sponsorship or external support. If you want to keep the site going feel free to send me a positive note on Twitter.