FAQ

Thanks for visiting our blog 🙂

On this page we have collected a few questions which we are asked rather often.

How can I support your work?

Thanks for asking! An easy way is to tell others about our work. So if you found article x helpful you help us a lot if you share it on a forum, on Facebook or wherever there are people people who might be interested in it.

Another way to support us is by using our affiliate links. If you click on a link and buy anything from diapers to photographic gear we get a commission of a few percent. We each have our own affiliate links and the money goes 100% to the author of each article.

Some of the articles also feature a Paypal Donate button that you can use to support the author directly.

Please review lens X

Please don’t send us requests to review specific lenses. Usually we have to buy lenses to review them and we can only do that if we are personally interested in them.

A full review is a time investment of several working days. If we calculated this time at our professional working rate a typical review would easily cost us above $1000. We don’t make nearly as much from the average review. Unlike most other blogs of this size we all have a day job and see reviewing lenses as a hobby. Because of that we are more free in how we review lenses and how we run the blog. It also means that we only review the lenses we are personally interested in.

Please compare lens X to lens Y

A full comparison is about as time consuming as a review and rather boring to perform. So we do comparisons rarely and only if we are personally interested in the result.

Is my lens decentered?

We put together this article so that you know how to test your lenses.

Will you review any more APS-C lenses?

We all use Sony A7 series cameras at the moment so we have little reason to use and review APS-C lenses. There might still be exceptions though.

Do you want to borrow lens X from me for a review?

Thanks for the offer! Usually though, we are more limited by the time we don’t have than the lenses we don’t have and our answer is no. Most of the time we have a few lenses waiting to be reviewed. When we are looking for a specific lens we usually ask on the blog or at Facebook.

Bastian is interested in reviewing some exotic lenses though, which he also listed here. These lenses are too rare and expensive to buy just to write a review, so if you happen to own one of them and you wouldn’t mind to part with it for a few weeks: please get in contact with him 🙂

Can I write a guest post?

Maybe.

If you have published a review or similar articles before and if you have an interesting proposal please get in contact with us. We would especially like to cover lenses for video more.

If you have no previous experience writing articles we suggest that you try to gain some experience by writing a review in a forum or on your own blog before. We try to maintain a rather high standard and if we have to invest a lot of time to work on a review of somebody else we would prefer to do it on our own 😉

How do you get exif information with manual lenses?

There are several ways. You can use the lens compensation app with cameras which support apps. Or you can add them later at home with a tool like LensTagger.

If you add them later you somehow need to keep track of your lenses and settings. There are different strategies to do that:

Phillip takes only mental notes but that works well enough for him since he was always good with numbers. What also helps is to have a limited number of lenses and not use too many different aperture values.
David usees the video button to leave self notes: “last pictures of xxx all with ZM at f/7.2” etc…. LR imports them in sequence, so it’s easy to listen and use Lens Tagger.
Bastian sometimes uses the “Lens Compensation” playmemories app, but there are some caveats: it only works somewhat decent on gen2 cameras and it slows the camera down considerably.

The prices you give in you reviews are way too low!

For used prices we research the prices by checking for how much auctions for copies in working condition ended on ebay in the last few weeks. Buy-it-now-prices – which are usually a lot higher – aren’t factored in.

We don’t update these prices since that would mean that we had less time for more productive writing. Prices and the value for money evaluation therefore valid for the time the review was published and prices can have changed since then.

Can I pay you to publish our article?

Nope.

Can I advertise on your page?