Photography specialist site DPReview is closing down

By Trevor Mogg March 21, 2023

Digital Photography Review, a popular online resource for photographers, is shutting down after 25 years of service.

The website’s closure is part of the restructuring plans announced this year by Amazon, which acquired DPReview in 2007.

“The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content,” DPReview said in a message posted on its website on Tuesday.

“This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year,” it confirmed.

DPReview added that “everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we’re grateful for the communities that formed around the site.”

Within hours of DPReview announcing its closure on Tuesday, another site dedicated to photography, PetaPixel, revealed it was offering a home to Jordan Drake and Chris Niccolls, whose YouTube channel, DPReview TV, shares camera and lens reviews, along with photography tips and other related content.

The pair will be the faces of a new PetaPixel YouTube channel launching in May and offering similar content as DPReview TV while exploring a number of new photography-related themes.

It’s not the first time Drake and Niccolls have shifted sites, as five years ago they moved from The Camera Store to DPReview.

“The show is going on,” Niccolls said in a video posted on Tuesday. “Everything that you know and love about [DPReview TV] , you’re still going to know it, you’re still going to love it, we’re still going to be doing our technical gear reviews out in the field, which means out in freezing cold Calgary, Canada. That’s not going to change.”

So vast is DPReview’s database of reviews and other content that it’s likely you’ve landed on the site whenever you’ve researched a camera or lens, or sought out news related to the industry. It’s not clear if the site will remain online so that its valuable resources remain accessible to photography fans, but it will certainly feel like a waste if the site simply disappears from view next month.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Photography

How to shoot macro photography

how to shoot macro photography 1807

A macro lens is a photographer’s ticket to shooting exotic images without leaving your own backyard -- or maybe even your living room. The environment you’ve looked at for years can feel like an entirely different world simply by getting up close to the tiniest subjects.

While macro photography carries big potential, shooting small has several challenges. Macro photography requires specific gear, and because of the way a lens achieves focus, getting a sharply focused macro image is often a struggle for beginners. Here are the best practices for shooting great macro photos.
What do you need for macro photography?
Camera
While a DSLR or mirrorless will get you the best quality, macro photos can be captured on most cameras -- even phones. The larger sensor of an interchangeable lens camera can capture more light and thus produce better image quality, but the physics of camera lenses means that the smaller a sensor is, the easier it is to actually get close to a subject. That’s why point-and-shoot cameras often have closer minimum focusing distances than a standard DSLR lens.

Photography

A favorite for street photography, new Ricoh GR III looks like an actual street

ricoh gr iii street edition kit griii se image 05

With a large APS-C sensor in a compact camera, the Ricoh GR III is a street photography favorite -- a fact the company is celebrating with a new special edition version of the camera. The GR III Street Edition Special Limited Kit gets a fresh coat of paint to make it look like, well, an actual street, with a textured metallic gray finish and yellow-orange stripe around the lens. It also comes bundled with the optical viewfinder and gains a touchscreen shortcut to activate the Full Press Snap feature, which will also be added to the standard camera via firmware update later this year.

This reskinned GR otherwise maintains the same specifications as the original. Ricoh says the new look is designed to be reminiscent of city streets, but the textured can also help improve the grip. The colorful ring around the lens finishes the street atheistic by channeling a road's yellow paint line.

Photography

Photography 101: What is a histogram, and how do you use it?

RGB-tonal-histogram

It's easy to set exposure by eye. We've all done it. The problem is that the electronic viewfinder or LCD screen on your camera does not show a 100% accurate representation of what the sensor is recording, and your own eyes may be focused on one part of the image while ignoring another. You could have blown-out highlights or crushed shadows that will only become apparent later when you open the photo in editing software on a computer.

The histogram takes the guesswork out of setting your exposure by showing you a graph of pixels arranged from dark to light. It provides hard data to confirm whether or not you have any areas of the image that are too dark or too bright for the sensor to capture correctly, or what are called "clipped" pixels.