'Popular Photography' magazine and PopPhoto.com to close after nearly 80 years

Sad, sad news. Popular Photography is/was a great magazine. I've been reading it for decades, since I was a kid. Subscribed for years looking forward for the next issue. Great photos and written content for general photography for people of all levels. Lots of good people, photographers, editors, contributors thorough the years (of course, many of us continue to remember Herb Keppler).

I'm subscribed to Shutterbug and Outdoor Photographer plus PDN (Photo District News) which is focused more towards the practicing pro and serious enthusiasts. But POP was my first photo mag, I learned a lot from it and will miss it a lot.

what happens to undelivered zinio subscriptions popphoto then?

I bet Eric Zinczenko, the CEO is crying all the way to the bank, May Eric & other upper bosses & the Board of Directors, who were involved in making this decision all suffer harshly soon.
I have been doing photography for over 30 years & Popular Photography had what photographers needed especially when looking for new equipment to buy.
Everyone who was involved with both Popular Photography & PopPhoto.com I wish the best of luck to all the staff because they did a great job for many years!

Pretty risqué cover photo for 1937 standards.

If they raised the cost of the subscription, I wouldn't have thought twice about paying an increase. It was one of the lowest cost subscriptions that I get, and easily one of the best values. It's sad to see them go, and their crew unemployed!

Wow, with the resurgence of film photography and the explosion of digital photography, this is the last thing I thought would happen to a great online and print magazine! Who can forget Modern Photography and Keppler (before they were merged with Popular Photography- a former rival) They launched and supported my passion for photography, which at one time was professional. Exposed us to great photographers like Adams, the Westons, Baer, Gowland, Kenna, etc., and great equipment over the years. They also introduced me to B&H and Adorama a long time ago. Their tests helped me find the best lenses, cameras, and films! Popular helped me find the best digital cameras and lenses. Agree with others, there is nothing like a printed magazine to take on an outing or trip - a welcome break from looking at laptop and phone screen. That said, i hope they put all their magazines on disk like National Geographic...

I read Pop Photo as a youth when I was given a Kodak plastic camera for my tenth birthday. As a teenager I scrimped and saved birthday money, odd job money to buy a coveted Asahi Pentax slr with the 50mm lens. Pop Photo and my dad's playboys were great magazines. I will always remember the 20 pages of ads from New York city camera dealers where you could see the cameras and lenses you desired only to find out that the deals in the backs of magazines didn't exist and you were never going to get your equipment at those advertised prices. There is nothing like a real paper magazine.

Popular Photography introduced basic photography skills to an extraordinary number of people over the decades. It was technically excellent, but not designed for the working professional, as the title implies. Without this magazine, it would have taken me a lot longer to understand the basics.
After mastering those fundamentals, I moved on to more sophisticated journals. One thing that pushed me away in about 2001 was the insistence that a 8x10 photo could was the size limit for 3 MP photo, yet my 'darkroom' guy and I were able to get 16x20 of the technology of the time.
Still, sorry to see it go, they had a great run!

So do I get a refund for my unused subscription? I loved this magazine, but I paid for a product and expect to get some sort of recompense

I remember PopPhoto claimed as The world's largest imaging magazine, now it's sad to see Popular Photography closed. Bought a few issues of Popular Photography from 85-95, still have them besides American Photo, Petersen's Photographic, Outdoor Photographers, Photo Asia & Foto Media. Time to throw them all into a trash bin.

PS. My favorite contributor is Herbert Keppler (Vice President & Director of Publishing), he usually writes several articles in one edition.

I hate towels, I really REALLY hate towels.

I used to read Modern Photography a lot in the early 80s. I loved the camera reviews, the catalog in the back, and "Keppler's SLR Notebook." He did an article where he advocated going through your slides and throwing away those out-of-focus shots as part of culling your collection but also as part of striving for excellence and not settling for mediocrity. I use that idea a lot when my wife gets mad if I delete a photo of our kids which is blurry (doesn't happen with me me but it happens to her ALL the time).

Video killed the radio star.....

Allow me to add a positive comment. Thanks Pop Photo. Everything I learned about B&W photography in the 70's came from Bob Schwalberg and Bill Pierce. Because Pierce was an experienced photojournalist, he showed how to create great shots on the run.

After I dicovered the British Photo mags, I never looked at pop photo. What really got under my skin is when they had a shootout and their final opinion was, "you decide".

I will miss this magazine. I am a subscriber. Do I get a refund?

I must admit ever since I discovered Dpreview I stopped buying photographic magazines, only when some special editions that caught my eyes. My local Library stock latest copies of the Pop magazine so I always make sure I have a good read - I shall miss it

I wish to thank the magazine generations of people behind it for the last 80 years including the advertisers. You are the back bone of the photographic industry - keep the light going while we are forced to go through so many changes.

Photography has changed a lot since digital, same for many other media forms, the camera industry has been declining for several years and i'm sure more magazines will vanish as result of that, internet is the way people use to read information about anything related to photography or fields of interest.

Sad news; I use to subscribe to this magazine a long while back, but, like most printed periodicals, cyberspace became their demise. Just way too much information can be acquired online making such rags and mags obsolete. Unfortunate but true. :)

Some memories...Herbert Kepler's opinion could make or break a new camera or lens, the view camera editor said to just buy whatever lens was newest, reading the tiny price listings in the back of the magazine, the editors defending the use of professional images in an amateur magazine, watching the emergence of Olympus SLRs and Vivitar Series One lenses.

Ah, fond memories of Pop Photo! Learned so much from them, back in the 80's. Loved that mag.

Popular photography as a concept is long gone. Today, it is sustained by sites such as DPR, which rely on Amazon sales.

But documentary photography, art photography, reportage photography, professional photography, etc. — in their very best and cutting edge — are very much tabula rasa to most users, and will always be.

Reorientation of the emphasis, and a different subscription model, would attract a few hundred thousand good enthusiasts globally, who would wait for the best of the best.

Photography is dead. I'm surprised these magazines have survived for so long or that some are still hanging in there at all. There will not one left in a matter of a few short years. Not one. And this, along with no more compact cameras of any kind, no more video camcorders whatsoever, and eventually no more consumer dslrs or cameras of any shape or form. Nothing. The only "photographic machines" that will survive will be very high end specialized optical products and top end very purposes oriented professional cameras. Everything else will be just phones. That's it. As soon as proper pixel density is a bit higher & there are actual working zoom lenses inside smartphones (not dual lens gimmicks or digital zooms crap), it will be the final nail in the coffin of photography as it's still known today. There will be as many people owning an extra camera in addition to their cell phones in a few years from now, as there are people today still using VHS or Betamax to tape TV shows.

Long overdue; this is not 1970.

A sad day, but it is difficult times for printed matter due to a variety of reasons, and only the exceptional survives. I just realised that I occasionally bought copies of Popular Photography for 42 years, more than half of the magazine's lifetime.