There are quite good camera reviewers out there, and there are quite good camera forums out there, but Camnostic was created to curate information coming from the forums to create ongoing, living documents for camera models. Information allowing for good camera purchase choices eventually makes it out into the market, as does information about the foibles every camera has, and work-arounds, hacks and known limitations.

Especially in the first months after a camera is launched there is much to learn that the manufacturer won’t divulge, such as the real dynamic range; which settings will negatively affect the frames per second; etc. Over time all things things become apparent due to the contributions of hundreds of people and their real-world experiences. Camnostic curates all of these observations and puts them into a form that is both easily accessible, and also well instrumented with forums that can be used to make further contributions.

 

About Us…

Interpretive portraits below by Kiki Fletis

Dirk Schmeltbottom

Dirk Schmeltbottom

Senior Editor

Dirk is a wildlife photographer living in Japan. He shoots products for major ad agencies and large, multinational consumer products companies. But his passion is wildlife photography. For work he shoots medium format, but while pursuing wildlife, he shoots a Sony A9 and a Sony A9 Mark II.
He is currently putting together a cooperative among several high-quality freelance commercial photographers in Asia.
Before becoming a professional photographer, Dirk worked for corporate marketing departments as an art buyer. 
Kiki Flétis

Kiki Flétis

Contributor

Kiki worked for several of the U.S.’s largest camer retailers in their catalog production departments, back when paper catalogs were a thing. She says she got interested in taking pictures herself over the course of a few years, as she collected experiences of photographers flaking out on her, forcing her and her staff to improvise some “egregiously bad” product shoots. She didn’t return to photography until she attended the Manhattan School of Fine Arts, where she eventually won her class’s most prestigious award available to the photography category. While managing art sales for several Bronx cafés, she started her own artistic journey, resulting in several gallery shows and some critical success. Her “Black 147” hangs a major hotel, and her controversial “Dark, Neutral” series of 16 large-printed black frames was recently purchased by a collector in Finland. Kiki shoots Nikon, both the old FE mount system as well as the new Z mount.

Tig Tillinghast

Tig Tillinghast

Structured Data Contributor

Tig is a writer and photographer from Vermont. After growing up in a poor area of rural New England, he working at large ad agencies out of college, eventually managing the interactive departments for large ad agency groups. He helped develop some of the first precedents for advertising photo rights purchases for commercial purposes online. His clients included more than a dozen Fortune 100 companies including Sony, Microsoft and Adobe. He left the agency world to help create internet infrastructure startups, and following the maturation of that industry left to create a trade publication firm. He currently shoots Canon (a brace of R5 cameras), but was recently in the Sony system, and before that the Panasonic full frame mirrorless S line, with the S1R. For a decade or so prior to that, he shot Canon EF mirror slappers.

Lars Demars

Lars Demars

Contributor

Lars grew up in Holland until his diplomat parents moved him to New York City at the age of nine and gave him a rangefinder with which to walk the streets. By high school, Dirk was doing paid portraits and “actor” headshot gigs, developing his own film and helping pioneer the use of super telephoto lenses for outdoor/indoor street photography. An early advocate against the regulation of photojournalism and street photography, Dirk was arrested multiple times, refusing to compromise on the rights of photographers to create their art in or from public spaces. He became a staff photographer, and later photo editor for Occupado magazine, the magazine first for Under Budget Asia Airways and then, after the acquisition, for LuckySkyHouse Air. When that airline came into possession of Lloyds of London after a series of covenant violations, Lars surfaced as Lloyd’s shipping confirmation photographer, traveling to some of the world’s most beautiful and out of the way places. It was there Lars developed his keen appreciation of weather sealing. Lars contributes from the North Atlantic, spending his time alternately in 11 different major shipping ports, often catching rides on large container ships that have varying degrees of internet access. He is now four years into his coffee table book project on shipping containers and is already planning a sequel on their interiors.  He shoots Panasonic L-Mount, and hopes to soon shoot the Sigma L-Mount body “if they ever come out with it.”