Weekend Spotlight: Digital Photography Review

Welcome, and happy Friday!

We're getting a new feature started on the CameraArts blog. The blogosphere is a very big place, and to a newcomer it can seem an insurmountable challenge to find the good stuff that floats around in the electronic haze of 1's and 0's that makes up the internet. Therefore our Weekend Spotlight on a fellow photography website will close out every work week. Don't be shy—if you think our websites are great, or not so great, or if there's something exciting going on at a friend's photoblog (or your own), please tack it to this post. Nearly anything goes!

Digital Photography Review

There are few things in the world of photography more dismal than the technical press release. What makes them so daunting is the frequent rehashing of information from the prior version of X camera or Y memory card, intermixed with corporate buzzwords that must be intended to attract the reader's attention. I don't know about the rest of you, but if I see more than two positive adjectives in sequence, my brain shuts off for the rest of the sentence.

The folks at Digital Photography Review have risen above this challenge, and assembled a virtually comprehensive news site for camera releases, accessories, software, and more. To find infomation about my camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, I can quickly pick and choose from their staggering selection of articles, previews, reviews, and sample galleries. A tech nut can wade around for hours, but for those with a shorter time budget, even the most arcane information is easily found on the site.

Digital Photography Review has been going since 1998, when dial-up connections were still common and tech forums were still kept in the darkest corners of the intraweb. Today, the site has somewhat of a blog format in their news presentation, and its archives, along with the forum, present an impressive base of information that grows by the minute, every day of every week.

The forum is a big part of this site, with its own subsection for any brand of digital camera that I, for one, would want. Once again, I used Panasonic as the filter when I browsed the site, and found, in addition to users posting their pictures, a number of questions about accessories and other basic nuts and bolts. The rate at which the user base offers up answers is impressive, often within minutes of the initial post. Forums are often overlooked as information sources, where communities of like-minded individuals share knowledge, purely to pass the time.

Accountability seems to be of utmost importance to the staff here, and announcements are released in step with the camera-makers, athough there are rare exceptions. Many assume that anyone with essential programming skill can launch a website, but the concerns in establishing a base and holding onto it are universal. Any one website is like a needle (or, more accurately, a bit of hay) in a haystack, and the fact that Digital Photography Review has survived on their integrity, as much as their presentation, says something about the ever-changing nature of the web.