Martin,
I don’t look at any reviews here, mainly because I have no interest in buying new gear. I am old, reasonably set in my ways, and realised at a young age that there is a difference between photography and collecting equipment.
I had the proverbial shoestring budget when I started my business in ‘66. It pained me, later, as things gradually improved, to be spending more money getting into where I should have been right at the start. My Nikon F came after two Exaktas, the first one bought whilst still an amateur. In 120 format, I bought a Mamiya TLR to get a 180mm lens for headshots that the old Rollei I’d also brought into the business from amateur days couldn't provide. Then, I managed to buy my first Hasselblad, at the cost of trading in the Rollei (that I later regretted losing), and a while later I was happy to say adios to that damned, clumsy Mamiya and 180mm, for a 150mm for the Hassy. In other words, trading up to where I should have started was more expensive, in the long run, than buying what I wanted in the first place, except that the one thing worse was running up debt.
So, new gear, today as an amateur, makes no sense at all. Nobody gives a flying fig about my photographs anymore, and that’s natural: nobody is paying for them. I suspect that, for the vast majority of LuLa people, the situation regarding their photos is exactly the same as mine - why blow your hard-earned if you don’t need to so do? Trust me: save. You have no idea what expensive shit possibly waits for you tomorrow.
Now, you are unhappy with the current LuLa review style, which as I wrote, I don’t read. However, the thing is, you don’t - and can’t - have Michael’s input anymore; the same holds with Kevin’s: they ain’t here no mo’. Anybody taking over the duties can only do it his or her own way. Trying to ape another’s style is a waste of time and doomed before it begins.
LuLa has gone through several natural changes, most of which I disliked, and I left the place a couple of times for quite long periods. That said, there wasn’t much else around to take its place. Yep, the number of visitors has shrunk remarkably, but there are probably several reasons for that beyond management issues.
Coinciding with the burgeoning world of digital photography, the reader interest in how to use the damned things, which ones to buy, there was, early on, only a one-way paradigm: growth of the site’s traffic. Those days of newness and “how?” have long gone. Camera makers see a steadily shrinking market, not just because of iPhone competition, but because they know full well that all that’s left to do with new gear is to play the numbers game. Remove the megapixel bait, and why would anybody buy another camera when what they already own is probably far more capable than are they as photographers?
That leads on to youtubers and such, influencers and similar, some better informed than others. A pretty face can attract the clicks and lead to making money. Advertising money goes to those places now, and you end up with the situation we have today: the virtual death of real camera shops, run by people who knew what they were selling. You have no idea just how unlikely it is that I will buy anything again, sight unseen, from some site that may or may not be a fraud; what photographic equipment I have bought online has only been from a company that I know existed long before the friggin’ Internet.
Another reason that I believe has led to the drop in readership, is the flight of so many professionals. Where the great car shooter, the group of architectural specialists, the advertising and fashion expert? All those skilled guys provided photographs very much worth looking at and pondering. Add to that the dearth of people willing and able to write about photography, and the attractions of LuLa shrink evermore. Frankly, I don’t believe that the interest in photography exists here anymore; I now tend to see it as a place where people just throw in some random holiday snap and hope for the best. Or, perhaps, don’t even care. Photography, in so many senses, is as dead as those rocks and mountains so beloved of the good St Anselm. I don’t think Jon or anyone else can do anything much to change the current status quo. Okay, bring in the dancing girls, that may do it. But hell, there'd be complaints about that too, I guess. ;-)
