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I have been a critic of Tony Northrup , a popular YouTube photography gear reviewer and spec sheet analyst, for some time. His channel which has morphed into a money making machine, has very little to do with the art of photography (check his portfolio and you will realize that he's not really a master of his domain). In his videos however he's often portraying himself as a teacher of photography, and selling various books on that topic. Unfortunately his books sell, because many people are naive enough to think that a high YouTube subscriber count equals to high photography skills. Nothing could be further from the truth here. Being the Peter Popoff of photography, he's often promoting the most expensive gear (something I have written about here ) possibly to collect more kickbacks from the hot links in his video descriptions. Some of his camera "reviews", especially on Sony , have indicated a positive bias, while he's been overly critical of Nikon and Fuji ...

Ricci Chera is a member of the Nikon School UK , a team of people working for Nikon, that is conducting workshops and seminars in London. Privately he is a landscape and wildlife photographer (here is his Instagram ). He's recently started his own YouTube channel "Ricci Talks" , and has shared several video reviews of the new Nikon Z7 camera with real world testing. Let me share them with you here. 1) Nikon Z7 & Z6 Size Comparison A nice size comparison of the new Nikon mirrorless cameras. 2) Nikon Z7 first look with Size Comparisons The camera is quite smaller than the D850, but not as tiny as some Olympus cameras for example. It's about D7200 size. 3) Nikon Z7 & Z6 Weather Sealing The camera is perfectly weather sealed same as Nikon's high end DSLRs. Big plus point in my opinion. 4) Nikon Z7 Battery Life Tests He shows that he had over 2 hours of 4k video recording on a single battery, and 1945 shots with 6% of the battery left during his wild life pho...

Stephan Wiesner is a German Youtuber with close to 100k subscribers, who is reviewing photography gear on his channel. He's also writing reviews on his blog , and publishing photography magazines in German language. He's also a landscape photographer, and is using Sony A7ii, Sony A6000 as well as Nikon D750. He likes all those three cameras for different reasons. Nikon Germany has recently approach him to review the new Nikon Z7 mirrorless full frame camera. He published several videos, from unboxing to real-life usage. Since the videos are in German, I will be translating some of his conclusions into English for you for a better understanding. One big difference between Stephan Wiesner and most American Youtube gear reviewers (like Tony Northrup ) is that there's a full disclosure in the video - watermarked! On the left side it says "Unterstützt von Nikon" - "Supported by Nikon" . That is referring to the fact, that he has not bought the camera, but g...

I used to find Ken Wheeler aka  The Angry Photographer , a Kentucky based hobbyist YouTuber, quite entertaining. In addition to that, I found he offered a great value when it comes to old Nikkor lens recommendations. I started to watch him in early 2015, when I purchased my first Nikon DSLR, and was looking for some nice cheap lenses. He used to be the guy who went against the mainstream, and recommended old cheap used AI/AI-S and D-Series lenses by Nikon, instead of the expensive new modern lenses. He was controversial from the start, and often obnoxious in his videos, but that was fine. I didn't mind it, it was kind of a quirky infotainment, which often delivered a nice chuckle. As months passed by he started to put his face more in front of the camera (his first videos were anonymous), and his channel grew steadily in subscribers and video views. He started to get more and more haters and critics, but at the same time also more and more fans, because he was not only reviewing l...

It seems that more and more popular YouTubers are turning their channels into sales platforms, and making what appears to be their usual content only for the sake of hot-linking to sales promotions on e-commerce sites like B&H and Amazon. Not only is this disingenuous, it might also be against the law, because the consumer is clearly being deceived. Let me show you two recent examples of that which popped up in my subscription feed these days. Matt Granger suddenly recommending a great value portrait lens It’s not so much about why Matt Granger recommended a good value Nikon portrait lens (he’s famous for being one of the biggest Nikon lens reviewers on YouTube), but more as to why now? - I’ll tell you why. It’s only, because Nikon is running a 50 USD discount for this lens for a limited time. If you purchase it by clicking on one of his hot-links in the video description, he will be getting a commission. Yes, Matt is mentioning all of this buried deep down in his video descripti...

Jason Lanier is a photography gear Youtuber, who built up his career with the help of Sony and their Alpha series of mirrorless cameras. At the same time he greatly helped building up Sony's name in the online hobbyist photography community, and probably helped to sell an enormous amounts of their overly expensive Sony Alpha cameras. His click-baity videos coupled with his arrogant persona often went viral on YouTube and gave Sony immense exposure. Lanier and his antics against Canon and Nikon DSLRs became a known name in the photography gear review community, and was a few years ago one of the top channels. This all changed in 2018. Analysis of Jason Lanier's Youtube channel 8 of Lanier's most popular videos have "Sony" in the title ( source , enlarge image ), most of them have Sony mentioned in some way. If we go on Lanier's website to his "Who is Jason Lanier" page , the name Sony is mentioned 5 times. The most notable paragraph is this one (as o...

Despite Sony being praised as the greatest thing since sliced bread by some amateurs , there's still one aspect of photography where Sony falls massively short in comparison with Nikon: Weather sealing . Not only did Sony recently lose several tests related to weather sealing , there are also not many Sony lenses to choose from, if you're into extreme weather wildlife photography like Morten Hilmer , a Danish photographer and vlogger, who brought his Nikon D5 into the Danish forest in a blizzard (see photos and video below), and the camera held up very well. Sony's Alpha system is still incomplete and notorious for having bad build quality, and often fail when taken to some extreme weather conditions, either hot or cold (several photographers have shared that on Youtube). The Tamron SP 150-600mm f/5-6.3 completely covered in snow. You can't enjoy winter photography like that with a Sony. Morten Hilmer shows why Nikon is still leader in photography. Check his "Behin...

A reader forwarded me the link to Tony & Chelsea Northrup’s Youtube video titled Sony A7 III review! . It’s a 7:44 minutes long video, that talks about the newly launched full frame mirrorless camera by Sony. It struck me more as an advertisement than a review, so I decided to write this post about an issue that I'm increasingly concerned about. Now most camera gear manufacturers are working with photographers and photography gear influencers. The first are actual professional photographers that are often seen in promotional videos by various brands, while the latter are photography enthusiasts with large social media following (Tony Northrup, Jared Polin etc), or websites dedicated to photography (DP Review). While brands like Nikon, Canon and Fuji usually focus on photographers (so called brand ambassadors), Sony usually (in addition to that) creates carefully staged launch events for the top social media influencers and gear reviewers (see [the 2018 list here]) and pays all ...

Today I watched Tony's Northrup's "What's in my camera bag?" video , where he showed which gear he took on his recent trip to Morocco. These kind of videos are fairly common and popular recently, so I could've chosen some other channel as well, but since he's one of the top photography influencers on Youtube in 2018 , an area I am personally interested in, I decided to choose him to share some of my opinions about these kind of videos, and the state of photography influencers in general, as well as the problems I have with it. First let us see the video. These are my 4 conclusions after watching Tony's video: 1) It's promoting exorbitant consumerism I'm sure that the gear in Tony's and Chelsea's travel bags consists of items that the couple personally loves. Both Tony and Chelsea strike me as honest and down to earth, so please don't take my criticism as a personal attack. It's not that at all. It's a syndrome of a greater i...

Another year is over, and it's time to look into the top 100 photography Youtube channels of 2018. Who made it on top this time? Who slipped? Who surprised? You will learn everything here. I have been doing this in 2016 and 2017 already, you can compare this list with the old one. For the record, I check this data one by one by going to the channel's About page, I do it within one day, so that it's a fair sample of the current situation. Things can quickly change on the internet, so if you're reading this a couple of days, weeks, or month later and realize that your channel has been moving higher, there's nothing I can do. I will make the next list in early 2019. Until then, this is what the rank will be for 2018. The rules These are some simple rules as to who I am listing: - The channel has to be in English language - The channel has to be about the art of photography or photography gear I want to list influencers in the English speaking online photography commu...

As previously often stated, I'm a big fan of Youtube, and I love photography , so you know that I am subscribed to a lot of channels who's main goal is gear reviews and photography tips. In fact, I'm following several such channels since early 2015, that is over 2 years now, so I do have some knowledge about which channels are popular, and what they're all about. This post is the second edition of the list, I have published the first one in December 2016 . Let us see how much has the situation changed in a little bit less than half a year. Read on, and see the list of 2017. Criteria The two most important criteria to land on my list of Top 100 Youtube channels are: The total video views and the channel has to be run in English language . I believe that the number of subscribers is less important than video views, Youtube itself has begun to defocus subscriptions and focusing on recommended videos, as well as trending videos. Video views are the real indicator about how...