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.

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 documentary photographer for the past twenty years. I'm primarily interested in cameras and lenses as tools for drawing, as I believe that photography really is a branch of drawing. I'm 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 which are linked in the pictures below or my review of the Canon 5D which was published on Imaging Resource. Together, they can provide you with a good sense of how I approach reviewing photographic tools.

Included on the site is my long-term review of the Epson R-D1, the first DRF (Digital Rangefinder) camera ever produced. This extensive article looks at the camera's performance and reliability over 15 months based on my own experience with three bodies and the experiences of 48 photographers who responded in detail to a custom-designed survey about the camera. This article should prove to be of interest for anyone who is curious about DRFs, whether they are R-D1 owners or not. For those who are considering buying the camera, I think that the article is essential reading.

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*: 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. Since the subscriber section of the site is written in Flash, the content is set at a fixed size and one needs a monitor resolution setting of at least 1152 x 864 pixels to see the full site (at full screen setting) without needing to scroll horizontally. To preview the size and design of the site please click here.

Again, please remember that the site appears at a fixed size (in pixels) on any monitor.* We have optimized the size of the site's active window based on feedback from many subscribers, most of whom are working with higher resolution displays. For ease of reading, however, there are ways to zoom the Reid Reviews Flash window to different sizes. See the tips at the end of this section for suggestions.

The active content of the site appears in a Flash window that can be vertically scrolled using the traditional on-screen graphics as well as the up/down arrow keys (on Windows and Mac platforms). On Windows platforms, the scroll wheel on a mouse can also scroll the content in the active window. 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 both my Windows and 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. 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. Its possible to browse Reid reviews using a low speed connection but doing so will require a great deal of patience. Since I myself am usually restricted to a satellite Internet connection, I sympathize with the plights of people working without true high-speed Internet access. But preserving the thoroughness and technical picture quality of the reviews requires that the included JPEGs be only lightly compressed.

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.

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Please subscribe writing your name exactly as it appears on your PayPal account (if you have one). Doing so can help to prevent problems with a subscription starting automatically.

If you have questions, please e-mail me.

A Side Note on Macintosh Computers and Text Readability

I work with both Macintosh and Windows computers.

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.

Zooming Reid Reviews With Macintosh OSX

Subscribers who use Macintosh OS-X computers, and who are working at screen resolutions greater than 1152 x 864 pixels, may want experiment with using the "zoom" feature in OS-X which allows one to, in effect, enlarge the Reid Reviews Flash window so that it fills as much of the monitor's area as desired. The site content can then be scrolled using the usual up/down page keys. For further information about this feature see this article. I'd like to thank RR subscriber Aurin Raeder for this excellent tip.

Zooming Reid Reviews With Windows

Subscribers who use Windows and would like to change the size of the active Flash window in Reid Reviews can do so using Internet Explorer 7 or Avant Browser.

"Still Photo" the new Reid Reviews discussion forum was launched May 1, 2008. If you decide to register for the
new forum, and I certainly invite you to, please allow up to 24 hours to have your membership set up. Questions
about registration, etc. should all be sent to Asher Kelman who owns Open Photography Forums. He can be
contacted directly on the forum site.