A New Direction – April Fools Day 2019

Music

I’ve been reviewing cameras for nearly 5 years on mike eckman dot com, and while it’s been a lot of fun, many other vintage camera blogs have come and risen to the occasion doing basically the same thing I’ve been doing.

Casual Photophile, 35mmc, Kosmo Foto, Japan Camera Hunter, EMULSIVE, Canny Cameras, Photothinking.com, Camera Go Camera, AlexLuyck, the GAS Haus, and many many others have countless reviews of the same cameras I used to talk about.

I still like blogging, but in a bit of an identity crisis, I decided to make a change and write about something else I am very passionate about, which is HEAVY METAL MUSIC!

As a life long metal head, I have many decades worth of vinyl records, CDs, and hell, even a few cassettes that I can talk about on a weekly basis.

If you liked my blend of TL;DR camera reviews, you’re going to love 5000+ words on what I think about the direction Metallica has gone in recent years!

Up the Irons!

Edit: 4/2/2019 For those of you who missed the joke, yesterday I “rebranded” the site as switching to a heavy metal music review site.

Many people who have only discovered this site in recent years likely don’t know, but when mike eckman dot com was formed in 2012, it was just a random blog for all of my personal interests, not just cameras.  I used to post my thoughts on music and other things back then, so I took two very old posts and quickly edited them to make them look new and sent them out to social media.

I changed my Facebook page for this site to reflect some metal album covers, and even created a heavy metal themed slider and logo for the site.  For those who missed it.  This is what the main landing page for the site looked like yesterday.

Thanks to everyone for the fun comments, both in this thread and on Facebook.  I’m not going away any time soon, so hopefully you can continue to enjoy many future camera and photography related posts!

17 Comments

  5. I’ve really enjoyed your review of vintage cameras. Your interests seem to coincide much with mine. However, though I’m a fan of classic rock also, I’m not interested in articles about it. I guess, unfortunately, I will have to say good-bye also. I forgot to mention that I think you are a very talented writer. Your articles were very well-written from an English aspect in my opinion.

    1. Robert, it’s too bad you won’t continue to follow my blog as I have a lot of exciting articles planned, including an in depth analysis of whether or not metal sounds better on vinyl, and a career retrospective of Nickelback.

  6. Best wishes mike, your pages were so informative ,searched in depth and well written. I will miss them .HM is not my favourite music but îll give the link to my son who is deep in HM : search youtube for soulhenge

  7. Really enjoyed your reviews (they made me try out a lot of cameras) and don’t agree that someone else did the same thing, at least not as well. Really liked the mixture of history and gizmos – gizmos accurately reflect where technology is, and their development is tied in closely with politics and history. I had an uncle who was train, and history crazy and knowledgeable and he loved to tell history stories in which trains played a central role.

  9. Good luck with it Mike. Hope it’s a big success for you. Your camera posts have been inspirational and whilst I am sad to see them come to a halt, I assume that I will still be able to read through them at my leisure and that they won’t disappear altogether. I will still be emailing you about our love of the NFL, and am looking forward to the upcoming draft in Nashville. As it turns out my wife is very much a metal-head too – I am taking her to see a tribute band this week – Led Zeppelin Masters. So I will be likely be providing her with info from your new blog. Her youth dates back to the metal bands of the 70s and she saw some of them live in concert in their heyday. Doesn’t headbang nowadays though as its likely to give her a terrible headache the next day :).

    1. Thanks for the well wishes. As for the fate of my older posts, I’ll be archiving most of them only keeping the ones for cameras that are truly “Heavy Metal” like the Kodak Medalist and the Argus C3s. Basically, if dropping it on your toe doesn’t break at least 3 bones in your foot, it’s gotta go!

  10. I’m sorry to hear this. I read most of the blogs you mention and very much appreciate the information they provide. However, I don’t think any of them provide as much information/get into as much detail as you do. I’ve very much enjoyed the historical information you provide on both the camera and manufacturer. So I’m sad to hear that you will be no longer doing this. I fully understand your thinking though and wish you all the best with your new endeavors.

  12. One should make the best of life and a decision to take a new direction should be applauded even by those who will sorely miss your camera posts – luckily (I do hope) – they will remain as an archive of important and very throughly researched material for all of us who love photography, and those who just love cameras. Though I have no interest in heavy metal and cannot understand the attraction to it (isn’t it what they use to torture prisoners?), because of the engaging nature of your writing, you may be able to enlighten me as to its value…so I’ll give it a go and keep following you. When you find good quality writing it’s worth pursuing…I haven’t the remotest interest in baseball or horse racing but for years read Roger Angell and Audax Minor in The New Yorker just because they were cracker reads. All the very best in your new venture!

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