p2tpeoples's Full Review: Popular Photography Magazine
Being an amateur photographer, one of the best and popular resources for information are photography magazines. Peterson’s Photographic and Popular Photography are the two most popular photography publications, and hence some of the best places to start for beginning and professional photographers. Popular Photography deals with all sorts of photographic subjects, ranging from traditional black and white photography to low-end digital photography to photographic accessories such as scanners, printers, and tripods. The articles are generally of good quality and length, and the reviews are usually fair and accurate. The caveats of the magazine are the abundance of ads and the annoying “detours.”
Not being dedicated to one medium of photography (as such magazines as Black & White and Digital Photography are) allows them a wide variety of subjects. This can be a blessing and a misfortune. Most photographers aren’t into everything, and such articles on digital photography won’t appeal to those without digital cameras. However, if you are just a casual photographer or one with a niche area, it is probably covered. Plus, it’s refreshing to read about other types of photography.
If you are interested in the subject matter, the content of the articles and reviews are high quality. The articles are usually full of great content and are well written, however some of them are a little on the long side and the articles on technique tend to drag on with un-necessary detail of the explanations (although some might argue that the technical points of technique are as important as the technique itself to understanding). The reviews are of good quality, yet tend to refer you to previous issues on similar products (for example, in this month’s Leica M7 review, they only told the differences compared to the M6 TTL and referred you to an article published over a year ago).
The only two problems in my mind are the quantity of ads in the larger-than-usual magazine and the excessive use of “detours” in the articles and reviews. The former is a big problem, with my rough estimate being that over 60% of the approximately 200-page publication being occupied by ads (taking into account the ads on the bottom-half of many pages). In fact, the whole back half of the magazine is ads for various photographic enterprises. Though not uncommon, it’s something that Popular Photography’s main competitor, Photographic, does not include. The latter qualm, the use of “detours,” does not seriously detract from the magazine, it’s just annoying. In most of the articles they will point you to the rest on some extremely high-numbered page, usually in the middle of the ads. This gets annoying because many of the ads for the photographic stores don’t include page numbers.
Overall, it’s a good magazine, but I’m not sure if I’d take it over Photographic. It has high quality articles, however in my opinion too many articles about point and shoot cameras and digital equipment and high quality reviews. Although the shear number of ads are disturbing and the detours are disruptive, they don’t detract from the magazine enough for me to not recommend it. Judge it for yourself, some people will like it, some won’t.
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