Wow, 20 years since I came on here as a brand new D100 owner in March of 2003!
In the early days, I was a digital newbie - I discovered quite quickly that having a degree from RIT from the film era meant little when it came to digital in some ways, so that meant a serious amount of education and exploring was in order. Today I wouldn't shoot film if you paid me to. From a lens perspective, at that time I was a test site junkie - give me the score, that was all you needed. Oh how wrong I was.
Thanks to Thom Hogan for the education, through his CDs and writings, in the early days of digital, and thanks to some great authors (Dan Margulis, Martin Evening, a few more whose names have faded) as I got a lot better in the digital realm fairly quickly. Lots of reading, lots of shooting.
From a lens perspective, being a test oriented person, I always had trouble with the correlation I wasn't seeing between the few available test sites and real life, and thankfully ran into Rorsletts great site back then, and learned a lot. Further reading, probably peaking in the past 5 years with the contributions from ex dpreview contributor Brandon Dube, an actual lens design student (and now designer) and the great writings and tests from Roger Cicala totally and completely re-educated me. Every article I could read, every book, every interview, I tackled to try and better understand the complexity of evaluating, truly evaluating, lens performance. I think I have a good handle on what occurs today, but I also remember that in the early days, I was wrong. A lot. So that means what I write today might be different from what I learn next week. Got to remind myself to never stop thinking, and to admit being wrong should new knowledge supplant old.
My two sided personality (either really nice or highly aggressive) didn't likely garner me a lot of "forum friends" along the way, but I am what I am, and call things like I see them. I still struggle to understand why so many are so emotionally attached to gear, to the point of being so vile and threatening, including in messages. I have always been one who believes in passing along knowledge, and hope I've done so, but the other side of the coin is I don't suffer fools or idiots at all, probably less so than anyone on the planet. And that's where the frustration side of dpreview forums certainly came in. Too many old, obstinate posters unwilling to learn, unwilling to admit they were wrong, and likely incapable of learning. A sad state. Between that and the dual obsession of test charts and MTF50 scores on one hand and the addition to some random, likely paid-off Youtuber on the other hand, it's even sadder. Add in the psuedo-science ("internal contrast", "inter tonal detail", etc) and the garbage that came out of the "all modern lenses render flat" nonsense, it's even more maddening.
On the positive side, I've "met" a lot of very interesting people in the forums and had some great discussions through messages and conversations in threads. I'll miss that, and for some folks, I'll continue that via other methods. I don't see joining a new site and continuing with forum contributions from here on - 20 years is likely enough, but we'll see how I feel about it down the road. I'm sure I'll have a few posts to write before the "end" of this site though.
Overall, it was a good run. I hope I've been able to reach a few folks with defensible, logical arguments that explained things that might lead to someones *own* exploration and testing - I never proclaimed to be the ultimate lens whisperer - I just want people to think on their own and go a bit deeper than what appears on the surface. As usual, I'll leave everyone with this, my oft quoted saying that is so vitally important: "Nothing can be more potentially misleading than an incomplete or improperly done test".
And that's that...
-m
