1pt4 | Matt Alofs

Colin’s reflections on (rebuttal of?) my original post on Photo Poets is thought provoking. For one thing, I might have to start looking at chromasia.com again. Although I thought chromasia was brilliant the first time I saw it, I haven’t followed it for at least 18 months. Based only previous experience I would have put it in in the category of decidedly bad photo poetry. The quote from chromasia’s David rhymes quite well with a lot of the disatisfaction I’ve lately been feeling with photoblogs, though, my own included.

Regarding Zeiss’ marketing acumen or lack there of, I’d say that Colin’s “striking, strongly styled, technically advanced, yet repetitive and shallow, photoblog[er]” is exactly the market I’d go for with a product like the Zeiss Ikon. When you’ve upgraded from the digi rebel to the 20d/30d to the 5d, and you still feel that something is missing, then you are ready for the Ikon! That of course suggests that a bad photo poet knows at least somewhere in the back of their mind something about how vacuous their content actualy is.

Is Zeiss smart enough to tap into this anxiety? Maybe. After all, they are also selling premium manual focus Nikon mount lenses for those on the D70, D200 anxiety-upgrade path. Now that I think about it, if I upgraded my brand new D80 to a D200, I could use the SLR version of the Zeiss 35 f2 that I bought a couple of months ago for my hexar ;-)