Ken Rockwell: The relevant irreverent...

When my long hibernating interest in photography first began to rouse Ken Rockwell's website was one of the first I visited. As a long time blogger on high end audio and golf, I was impressed by what he had accomplished from the perspective of web relevance.

Just how web relevant is Rockwell?

Consider this: My favorite photography web site, Photo.net has something over 80,000 inbound links, which is impressive. Photo.net is run by a pretty big bunch of people and has thousands of members who contribute scores of images and forum posts every day. In contrast, Ken Rockwell's site has about 40,000 inbound links. The fact that Rockwell can boast 50% of the web relevance of photo.net in no way denigrates photo.net or the fine work of its founder, Philip Greenspun. It does, though, suggest that Ken Rockwell is doing something very, very right even if he's sometimes wrong.

Back in the 90s, I worked full time in high end audio. My day job was to handle the marketing and advertising for a handful of small but very highly regarded companies. I enjoyed the work and loved the industry, especially in the international markets. When the internet hit its stride, the high end changed forever. Sure, home theater changed it significantly, too, but it was really the web that caused the sands to shift most drastically. What the web did was something that no print magazine could ever do, it got audiophiles out of their listening rooms and onto their keyboards (computer keyboards, that is). Audio-geeks around the world quickly found that it was even more fun to surf the web about audio than it was to listen to music.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but...

Before long the web was clogged with hundreds of audio experts bent on spreading their own neurosis on audio (and sometimes music) and succeeding to an often frightening degree. The web, as it often does, minimized the relevance of the expert opinion in favor of collective belief. It may seem that I have digressed but this is really getting back to Rockwell, I promise.

The value of Rockwell's site is that it plainly and unambiguously presents the view of a single expert in a way that is easily accessible and comprehensive. This is a man who understands the web, photography and language. Rockwell knows how to use a phrase to make readers think, if not simply agree with him. One example is when he says that zoom lenses are for lazy people who don't like to move. When I read that I thought to myself, is that right? Well, it's kinda right. Rockwell's point was that photographers can move, sometimes more readily than their subjects so why not do that instead of carrying a heavier lens?

It was rather liberating (for a minute, anyway) to think that maybe I didn't need that new zoom lens after all (the one I just bought). Rockwell doesn't always need to be right to achieve his mission. But, when I simply want to get a quick, clear technical take on something I tend to visit his site first. I may go elsewhere for more information afterward, but not always. In a way, Rockwell is photography's version of an anti-wikipedia. In Rockwell's world, consensus is not always very persuasive.

Rockwell is far less a cynic than an iconoclast, one who challenges us to qualify and quantify our choices and beliefs. In the end, of course, he is selling his site and its link relevance but while he's doing that for his own financial gain he is providing information that is at once meaningful and well presented.

I am often surprised by the vigor bordering on outright animosity directed at Rockwell. Rockwell wrote, "Sharpness is the most overrated aspect of lens performance." Now, I'm sure a lot of guys who own very sharp lenses got pretty rankled by that. Of course, I want my own lenses to be sharp but I'm not going to worry too much if they aren't the sharpest.

From a philosophical standpoint I do worry that the guy who is truly concerned about ultimate lens sharpness may not be spending enough time actually taking photos. That kind of guy reminds me a bit too much of the high end audio guys who quickly found it more satisfying to lurk audio websites rather listen to music. In a way, Rockwell mocks without mocking the hundreds of posts about this lens versus that lens or whether the Mark II version of whatever should really have been designated as a Mark I Improved instead. If that's true, Rockwell is often taking a shot at me, and I'm OK with that, too.

Rockwell's site holds the enviable position of being able to tell his readers that their gear doesn't matter while simultaneously functioning as a conduit to a bunch of sites where readers can buy the very same gear Rockwell just finished telling them they don't need. Ken Rockwell is, then, something of a contradiction, even to me. I am very likely to continue to disagree with some of what he says, but it would be a very big mistake to call him irrelevant.