10 Years of Camera Reviews

10 years of camera reviews…

I could just end this post here and I’ll have said all that I probably need to, but if there’s one thing that writing camera reviews for the past decade has taught me, is that I am not good at brevity.

I’ve shared the origin story of mike eckman dot com a number of times, but just in case you haven’t heard it yet, in December 2014, I thought it would be fun to write my thoughts down about an Argus C3 Matchmatic that I had been playing with.  That one review turned into two, then three, then a dozen, and after a while I lost count.  That first review wasn’t even about my first vintage camera, as I had bought an 85 year old (at the time) folding Kodak and a Nikon EL2 earlier that year, but for whatever reason, in December I got the bug to start writing reviews.

Back then, this site was a personal blog that nobody read.  My earliest posts go back to 2012 when I first discovered WordPress, and the actual mikeeckman.com domain went back even farther when I had registered it because I thought it would be cool to own my own domain.  The origins of mikeeckman.com had no direction, no plan, no goal in mind.  The earliest posts are actually still on the site today and include my thoughts on movies I had watched, the best metal albums of 2012, my defense of the Boy Scouts of America, what I thought would make for a cool sequel trilogy to the Terminator franchise, tips and tricks on writing resumes, and why I think it is important to buy surge protectors.

As 2015 started, I kept reviewing cameras, but the site still wasn’t a serious camera blog.  I kept writing about non camera things all the way until the end of 2016 such as this glowing review of the first season of Stranger Things.  Back then, readership of this site was almost zero.  Like most WordPress sites, I used Jetpack to track my traffic, and my traffic was so low, Jetpack stats didn’t register until the site was almost 2 years old.

In the years that followed, I started to get a knack for writing, my reviews got better, my ability to shoot more and more old cameras grew, but most importantly, I started to have engagement with site readers.  By the end of 2017, I was being encouraged by people like Adam Paul, Jim Grey, James Tocchio, Mark Faulkner, Mike Novak and Hamish Gil.  I created a private chat group on Facebook consisting of other film camera bloggers, and my understanding of what goes into a successful site grew.  I started to take the site more seriously.

In April 2019, the site moved to its first dedicated web server from a Windows 2008 box I had sitting in my basement.  The site was very slow and the amount of traffic the site was generating had reached a point where my residential internet line couldn’t support it.  It was also this year in which I started to show an interest in podcasts, being a guest on the Classic Lenses Podcast a number of times with Johnny Sisson, Simon Forster, and Karl Havens (later Perry Ge).

In 2020, the world came to a halt as the COVID-19 pandemic started and with an abundance of free time, I spent more time shooting, developing film, and writing reviews.  That year, the site topped 400,000 annual visitors putting me on more people’s radar than ever before.  The number of people I was talking to had increased dramatically.  Vladislav Kern, Robert Rotoloni, Stephen Dowling, Paul Rybolt, Rudi Berden, Roger Beal, Kurt Ingham, and many others were encouraging me by loaning me their cameras, some of which were models I would have never had a chance to play with otherwise.

The years continued to pass and the site kept growing.  I had written over 100 articles in the Keppler’s Vault series, I had added scans of every single issue of the Zeiss Historica collector’s group newsletter with an introduction written specifically for me by Larry Gubas.  I launched a new series of articles with Nikon historian Robert Rotoloni as the Rotoloni Report, I started doing interviews in my short lived One Hour Photo series.

In 2021, on a whim, two spontaneous podcast episodes called Cocaine and Waffles were recorded without any warning.  No one was given notice or any heads up it was happening.  Johnny Sisson and I thought it would be fun to create what we called an “open source” podcast where we just invited whoever was available and talked about whatever they wanted.  Those two episodes from May 2021 turned into the Camerosity Podcast which launched in August of that year with Paul Rybolt, Anthony Rue, and Theo Panagopoulos.

2022 was another great year.  The site surpassed 600,000 total views, and served nearly 10 terabytes of data worldwide.  The Camerosity Podcast grew in popularity with our reach including guests such as inventor of the digital camera, Steve Sasson, author and 30 year Kodak employee Robert Shanebrook, and curator of the George Eastman museum Todd Gustavson.

In 2023, my good friend and site supporter Kurt Ingham passed away from a years long battle with cancer, leaving parts of his collection to me, which did have the benefit of giving me access to more cameras than ever before, but at the expense of losing a friend.  I’d gladly give them all back to have Kurt back, however.  The site hit another record with over 676k views, a record that won’t be broken in 2024.

Finally, here we are in 2024.  The total number of cameras reviewed on this site is nearing 500, with nearly 100 episodes of the podcast, and countless other reference articles, guides, and how-tos.  As I look back on the past 10 years, I cannot believe everything I’ve accomplished.  While I am sometimes quick to say I did it all on my own, that’s a lie as I did it with the support and encouragement of so many others.  Although the content and the IT Support is from me, there’s no way the site would be what it has became today without many other people’s love, help, and encouragement.

Ten years is a long time for a blog.  There have been many others that have come and gone.  Some still linger on without any updates, and others which have disappeared entirely, remembered only by archived pages on the Wayback Machine hosted by archive.org.

What’s Next?

This next section is a going to be a little difficult to write, but for the many hundreds of thousands of people who have visited this site, or in some way have supported me, I owe it to you to be honest when I say that the time has come for my priorities to change.

Before anyone jumps to any conclusions.  No, the site is not going away.  I have written instructions on who will maintain the site should I ever pass away or no longer be able to maintain it.  The site is also not going to go dormant.  I will still write reviews, and will still post content here.

What will change is the frequency of new content.  I still love the site and I still love film cameras, but the past 10 years has taken its toll on me.  These past couple years, I found myself not enjoying the process as much as I used to.  A youthful excitement to shoot and review a camera has been replaced with days and weeks of writer’s block and a general lack of motivation to keep putting out new content.  While I still believe that my reviews have maintained a high level of quality, it has taken a lot more out of me to keep writing them, and I have reached the point where it is no longer fun.  I’ve actually felt this way for over a year and had I not been so close to a 10 year milestone, I might have already stopped, but I convinced myself that I wanted to make it to December 2024 to celebrate 10 years.

Now that December 2024 is here, it is time that I take an extended break from the site.  I do not know exactly what the future will bring.  I know this will hurt my traffic, I know my Google search rankings will suffer, I might even lose some readers, and that is okay.  I have made my mark, I have made a lot of incredible friends, and I’ve built an excellent resource of information for collectors all over the world.

I currently have two drafts of reviews partially written which I plan on pushing out before the end of this year.  After that, I will still post new content here and there, the Camerosity Podcast will continue, I’ll still participate on Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, it will just be less.  Maybe after an extended break, I’ll regain some of that excitement and motivation I used to have, and come back with weekly reviews, or maybe I won’t.

So for now, this isn’t goodbye.  Like I said, the site is not going anywhere, I’m not going anywhere, I am just re-prioritizing where reviewing cameras fits into my life.

Thank you to everyone who has in some way contributed to this site.  Whether you loaned me your Hasselblad Xpan, donated some money through PayPal, or just contributed a comment to one of my posts.  You have helped make this site what it has become over the past 10 years, and I am eternally grateful.

Signing off (for now)
Mike Eckman