Welcome to ReidReviews

Welcome to ReidReviews.com, an on-line magazine of reviews and essays by photographer and writer Sean Reid. Each year, there will be at least twelve new articles about the tools and practice of photography added to this site. As of winter 2012 there are well over two hundred thirty articles on this site - many of them very extensive. There are no press releases, news summaries or the like but only reviews, essays and other writing about photography.

Every writer naturally brings his or her own experience and perspective to the articles he or she writes. My writing is heavily influenced by my experience working as a professional photographer for more than twenty-five years. I'm primarily interested in cameras and lenses as tools for drawing, as I believe that photography really is a branch of drawing. As the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said in an interview, "My photography is just an instant drawing...I never quit drawing. The camera is a way of drawing."

I'm also guided by the photographer Andre Kertesz's observation, "I see the thing, I feel the thing, I make the thing". So when I review a camera or a lens, I look primarily at how it presents the world to the photographer (via the finder), how it works as a tool in the hands, and how it draws the kind of picture we call a photograph.

"We all owe you a vote of thanks for such a massive and thorough piece of work. What a concept-- a "lens test" that is really about the pictorial effect of how lenses draw their images. Lines per millimeter and MTF graphs have their place, but your article really gets to the heart of the matter in the way that photographers can relate to instantly."

"This is a really excellent in depth review. I particularly like how you guide the reader not to look for winners, but to use it as a reference for their own needs. I think it may turn out to be a reference classic for working photographers seeking how to judge lenses in real world use.. I for one will be returning to it."

"I read your substantial paper with great interest. I am an amateur enthusiast in photography and optics. Your concept first surprised me, because I have had an impression that few photographers in North America and possibly in Europe like to discuss lens characters as expression tools. Among Japanese photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, there is a long tradition of interest or even addiction in appreciating various image characters of optics. For instance, Shoji Ohtake, one of the most influential photographers in Japan writes a regular column titled Lens Physiognomy for a major camera journal. He says that for each of his representation he selects the right lens from his huge collection. I was impressed by your pragmatic and well-organised approach in reviewing the lenses. Your observation is keen and relevant to essential aspects of photographic imagery. Your rhetoric is straight, logical, and free from jargon. These are rarely met in review papers on similar tests, which tend to be too technical or too subjective. I should also tell you that I myself have evaluated lenses mostly in B&W for the same reason as in your reviews. Few people have understood me. All in all, it is a marvelous paper. My applause."

"...a very informative, even enlightening, work. It not only provides visual evidence of comparative lenses' performance, it also gets right to the most important factor of lens evaluation - how the image looks to the photographer. Long ago I stopped reading test charts of lenses since none of my clients ever published any. It is always the look of the finished image that counts."

"I hope your tests become a benchmark for other reviewers to pay more attention to the real needs of photographers..."

"I think that your approach is what photographers have been asking for. Your article was spectacularly successful. I didn't think a review could be any better than yours on wide angles for the R-D1, but you topped it with this one. Thank you for all the hard work that went into it!"

ReidReviews.com accepts no advertising. A subscription is currently $32.95 per year. To get an idea of whether or not my writing will be useful to you, I'd recommend reading some of my existing reviews on Luminous-Landscape and Imaging Resource which are linked in the site's article index. Together, they can provide you with a good sense of how I approach reviewing photographic tools.

A list of current articles on Reid Reviews can be found at the site's table of contents.

The one-year subscription rate for the site is $32.95. Once your username and password have been issued, the subscription amount is not refundable. The best way to sample my reviews (to decide if you'd want to be a subscriber) is to read my freely available Luminous-Landscape and Imaging Resource reviews linked above. Pay Pal customers can pay for their subscriptions using their Pay Pal accounts and people who are not Pay Pal customers may make a one-time credit card payment to Reid Reviews via PayPal. To make a payment by check please follow the instructions listed on the "subscribe" page which is linked below.

Important: Reid Reviews' normal business hours are 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM EST Monday through Friday (excluding holidays) and any problems with subscriptions, responses to e-mail, etc. are normally handled during those business hours. I am, however, sometimes away for medical appointments during those hours and appreciate your patience if you need to wait for a response to your e-mail. If subscribing, please be sure that the full name you provide exactly matches the name on your PayPal account. If they don't match there's a good chance the system will not be able to start your subscription automatically.

*Important*: Before Subscribing, Please Note the Following:

The subscriber section of ReidReviews.com requires Macromedia's Flash player (version 7 or later), which you may already have installed on your computer. If not, you can download it for free here. We recommend using the newest version of Flash that is available for your computer and, for some browsers, using the newest available version of Flash may be required. The article window appears at a fixed width and one needs a monitor resolution setting of at least 1152 x 670 pixels to see the full site (at full screen setting) without needing to scroll horizontally. To preview the size and design of the site, at minimum size, please click here.

The height of the article window, however, can be set to one of four sizes: 656 pixels (default), 915 pixels, 1065 pixels or 1305 pixels. I normally use a 24" NEC Spectraview monitor and so I usually view the site at the 1065 pixel setting. To change the article window height click on one of the grey boxes that appear to the right of the article window.

The active content of the site, appearing in the Flash window, can be vertically scrolled using the traditional on-screen graphics as well as the up/down arrow keys or mouse scroll wheel.

For security reasons, the site content cannot be copied or printed. None of the material published on Reid Reviews may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.

This site is best viewed on a calibrated monitor. My own calibrations are based on a gamma of 2.2, for my Macintosh computers, and monitors calibrated to other gamma levels will display these pictures in ways that aren't quite as intended. Please keep that in mind, as you read the articles, if you are calibrated to a gamma other than 2.2. My own editing monitor is an NEC 2490 Spectra View which I calibrate regularly.

Reid Reviews is a high-bandwidth site full of high quality JPEGs that, intentionally, are saved with minimal compression so each picture file is quite large (given its dimensions). So in addition to having a monitor resolution of at least 1152 x 864 pixels, I also strongly recommend that readers use a high speed Internet connection for browsing the site. It's possible to browse Reid Reviews using a low speed connection but doing so will require a great deal of patience. Preserving the thoroughness and technical picture quality of the reviews requires that the included JPEGs be only lightly compressed. For this reason, however, the RR article pages load more slowly than a typical web page (but the technical quality of the JPEGs on those RR pages are much higher than is normal on the web).

When you choose your user name and password *please* record them in a safe place for future reference. If you misplace your user name or password please click on the "Log In" link and follow the instructions there.

Paypal should automatically confirm your payment so that your subscription begins immediately. Due to the mysteries of PayPal, however, this sometimes does not happen for a small percentage of new subscriptions. The most common reason for Paypal subscription problems is entering a subscription account name that does not exactly match the name one provides to PayPal. If you've made a subscription payment but do not yet have access to the site, please contact us to manually confirm your subscription. I am a working photographer, however, so I'm not always at the computer and your patience is appreciated. That said, I do my best to get accounts activated as quickly as possible once I know that manual activation is needed.

When you subscribe, please enter your name exactly as it appears on your PayPal account (if you have one) or credit card (if paying without a Paypal account). Doing so can help to prevent problems with a subscription starting automatically. Name mismatches are the primary reason new subscriptions do not activate automatically.

Again, if the name you enter for your subscription does not match the name on your PayPal account (or credit card) there's a very good chance that your subscription won't start automatically.

If you have questions, please e-mail me.

Article Index

The Reid Reviews article index can be found here. It includes links to all of the articles on the site but one must first log in to the site before clicking a link on the index page.

Our Policy On Advertising

Reid Reviews believes in the significant value of clearly separating reviewing and advertising. The site has not ever accepted - does not and will not accept - advertising. Our content is supported by readers alone. It is a simple exchange - the people who read the content pay for its creation. Advertisers pay for much of the content one reads on the web and in print. Reid Reviews, by very conscious choice, does not work that way.

As many readers know, RR is an independent site in many senses of that word. We hope that our readers can appreciate the value of this approach. As a society, we are barraged with advertising (on the web, on televison, on radio, on buses, streets, etc.). Reading Reid Reviews is, we hope, an oasis from that.

The purpose of advertising, ultimately, is to convince us that we need to buy whatever product a manufacturer wants to sell us. Advertising in photography has long perpetuated the myth that owning certain brands and certain products will magically make one a better photographer. But we all know, of course, how false that myth is.

Flash Support On Apple iPhones, iPads, etc.

Apple's iPad and iPhone devices do not support Flash and so this site cannot be accessed directly on an iPad or iPhone. Subscribers, however, have reported successfully reading the site on an Ipad using a remote computer control application called Ignition. See details about that option below.

Flash allows Reid Reviews to maintain a degree of content security (imperfect though it may be) without requiring subscribers to install security keys on their computers. Having recently looked at the various alternatives to Flash, we've found no even partially secure options that don't require the reader to install special software and/or use security keys on a fixed number of computers. In its current Flash format, Reid Reviews can be read on most modern computers that include a monitor resolution of at least 1152 x 670 pixels and which have a high speed connection to the Internet. The only software needed is the free Adobe Flash player that many computers already have installed. So readers can access their accounts on computers at work, at home, while travelling, etc.

Reid Reviews subscribers have reported successfully reading this site (and others that use Flash) on an iPad when using a computer remote control application called Ignition made by a company called LogMeIn. One installs software, on both the Ipad and a Mac or Windows host computer, which allows the Ipad to control that computer almost as if he or she were using it directly. For a review of this option, see this article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Naturally the host computer needs to be on and connected to the Internet for this to work. For those are interested in this software I've written a short article overviewing how one can use it to read this site on a iPad.

Ad Blocking Software

Some Ad-blocking software (such as "AdMuncher" for Windows) can reportedly interfere with the functioning of Flash based sites such as Reid Reviews. Of course, Reid Reviews has no advertising (pop-up or otherwise) but at least one reader has reported that "Admuncher" was blocking the articles on this site. The solution, reportedly, is to make reidreviews.com an exception in the ad-blocking software.

A Possible Bug In Macintosh Snow Leopard

Readers using Snow Leopard may find that they need to reinstall some of their system fonts. If you log into Reid Reviews and can see pictures but no text, be sure to reinstall Arial fonts. Some Mac OS upgrades can be especially temperamental about this. One reader noted that he needed to use "Font Book" to move the Arial fonts from the "user " to the "computer" area. Why do some Macs lose certain fonts with an OS upgrade? I wish we could tell you. Obviously, they shouldn't be.

A Side Note on Macintosh Computers and Text Readability

I work primarily with Macintosh computers but also periodically check the site functionality on Windows machines.

Macintosh OSX, and later Macintosh operating systems, anti-alias fonts in such a way that some (such as myself) find it more difficult to read text. Without any special smoothing, the text on the Reid Reviews site should look like this. For a further discussion of this issue and some proposed solutions, see this article. In particular, Mac owners who find it hard to read the smoothed fonts created by OS-X might want to try downloading the free Tinkertool and using it to disable font smoothing up to, say, 18 points. This change can make most Mac text much more readable to those of us for whom smoothing causes eyestrain, etc. That true not only for this site but also for thousands of other sites on the web.

The articles on Reid Reviews are displayed using Arial as the font. It's a Sans Serif font that some argue is less readable in print, than a Serif font would be, but more readable on screen. Opinions vary widely on this topic and several of the studies cited to support the use of Serif fonts have been heavily challenged and criticized. Readers who are interested in this topic might find this article, for example, to be of interest.

It is important that one have the Arial fonts installed, on his or her computer, to view the site correctly. If those fonts aren't installed, one may observe various layout problems in the articles on the site.