Photography Magazines Crack Me Up!

LensWork is unbelievable, View Camera is also well done, most of the rest is bird cage fodder...

Todd
 
I don't subscribe to any anymore(but Lens Work is hit or miss at the local shop, I'm likely to subscribe to that one) but I do buy several pretty regularly:
Camera Arts, View Camera, and Black and White Magazine(the US magazine). Occasionally, I will pick up a copy of Photo Techniques depending on the articles inside.
Most magazines are ad financed, so they are/become ad platforms.
I get six or seven different trade magazines for my field (I'm a chef) and those are ads posing as editorial content from first page to last!
I never asked for any of them but they keep sending the silly things; not only have I never responded to the "HURRY! Your subscription ends SOON!" BS and, in fact, have been a little rude to the people who call me in the middle of lunch service to ask me if I want to renew my restaurant magazine:rolleyes:
but they keep sending the damn things.
Rob
 
Magazines (like newspapers in the US) are desperate. The fact is, they were never very good, but they were better than nothing, which was the competition. Now the competition is the internet and forums like this one, and they are seriously screwed. The Leica forum and this one had massive discussions of problems with the M8 the day after it was first released -- the magazines still haven't caught up, and probably never will, because they don't want to offend a potential advertiser. To appeal to all camera users, magazines used to do "Spotmeter or Not?" articles all the time; in the meantime, a Canon or Nikon user was getting nothing really specific on his or her camra. Along comes the 'net, and not only are you getting specific info, you're getting it in real time, you can actually get serious questions answered, and you can more-or-less hang out with people with similar interests, no matter how exotic the interests are. LensWork might be the model for a new magazine -- very high-res photos, something that can't easily be done on the net, at fairly high prices, along with passably intelligent commentary. Of course, that might not last either. Maybe photo websites will start accepting uploads of large, high-resolution photo files intended to be printed on home machines, so everybody can look at your shot at 300dpi...

JC
 
mexipike said:
Anyone like aperture?
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I love Aperture ... its so freakin hard to find though

B&N will stock it one minute but then there is such a long wait between issues they end up forgetting to stock it when it finally comes out.
 
I'm another person who signed up for free Rangefinder magazine ages ago even though their website said US addresses only. I still get two copies every month.

It would be better if they renamed it 'Event Photographer'.
 
In the early 90s, after contributing various articles to several magazines, I had the dubious honour of being "invited to lunch" with the then editor of Practical Photography . One of the first things he asked was "who do you think we write for and why?".

I replied along the lines of "helping serious amateur photographers make informed decisions" etc. etc... The poor man looked upon me with a pitying expression: "No- its the advertisers - We write for the advertisers. That's what a magazine is for - advertising". Gazing down with infinite compassion, he asked "have you ever thought of becoming a teacher?".

Now Camera Weekly - that was a magazine! (falls over shrieking hysterically).

Cheers, Ian
 
Jocko said:
In the early 90s, after contributing various articles to several magazines, I had the dubious honour of being "invited to lunch" with the then editor of Practical Photography . One of the first things he asked was "who do you think we write for and why?".

I replied along the lines of "helping serious amateur photographers make informed decisions" etc. etc... The poor man looked upon me with a pitying expression: "No- its the advertisers - We write for the advertisers. That's what a magazine is for - advertising". Gazing down with infinite compassion, he asked "have you ever thought of becoming a teacher?".

Now Camera Weekly - that was a magazine! (falls over shrieking hysterically).

Cheers, Ian
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I'd never have guessed, Ian. And I was so careful not to mention Practical Photography in my anecdote, too :)

Typical PP tip: "Always stop your lens down to the minimum aperture to achieve maximum sharpness". I imagine this is designed to make you eternally dissatisfied with your lens and thus "upgrade" it. Writing for the advertisers indeed.
 
Dean said:
This was from a 1946 issue of Pop Photography.

"When the time comes that defeated Japan is again permitted to enjoy the benefits of world trade, a vast market for photographic goods of all sorts will open to American exporters. Japanese photographers recognize the superiority of our photographic products over theirs and are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to purchase American cameras and equipment".

So much for their ability to predict the future of photography.

Dean
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HAHAHA! This made my day :D :D

In germany/austria the situation ain´t better regarding the retarded ad Magazines. The only ones worth reading IMHO are the german "Schwarzweiss" magazine and the UK Black & White Mag.
Everything else is just sales-talk
 
DPI does not matter at all. Pixel size is what matters for digital images. They priont at whatever DPI they want. A 5000x5000 dpi image looks huge on the screen and will be enough for printing 12"x12"or even bigger, depends on the general image quality of the magazine.
I guess they mention 72 DPI only because most people with digicams know about this number (and consider it some magic number, since most of them don't know what it represents).
 
As to magazines, I am a bit disappointed in LensWork.
Sure, great images to see, mostly. But the text that shows up in it, written mostly by the same two people, are, after a few numbers, getting very monotone and ...a bit boring. Too much philosophy, always on the same track, and a little bit in the style of a school textbook, or a highschool teacher talking to kids. I bought the first-fifty-editions CD as well as a year subscription; some of the interviews are fine, the imnages are mostly great (although the PDF ones on the CD are of so-so technical quality) but the articles of the chief editor and the "end notes" are repetitive and often just some bitter ventings written on a more literal level than you'd find on an internet forum.

Just my feeling, after going through about 25 editions.
 
Jon Claremont said:
I used to enjoy Camera in the late 70's early 80's which was not about cameras at all but about photographs.
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Yes, Zoom was the same I’ve still got a dozen or so copies from the late 70s I think, only 2 or 3 pages of adds and one equipment review, I came across them a few weeks ago, very refreshing, on the down side it was £2.00 an issue in 1979!!!!
 
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