About Us

Howdy folks! Welcome to Sony Photo Review, your one-stop-shop for anything and everything related to Sony camera gear. Whether you’re a seasoned pro raking in gigs, a photography noob, or someone in between, we’ve got plenty of guides and gear reviews for you!

Our Mission

Alright, at the risk of sounding super generic: we’re here to provide a centralized space where Sony users can come to get honest/hands-on reviews of new products or just come to learn more about what they already have. Our long-term goal is to create a sort of community or hub where fellow Sony nerds can find all the info they’d ever need on their gear.

What We Offer

• Detailed Reviews: Our gear reviews are filled with crazy amounts of details and deep dives, but you won’t find any useless fluff. Typically, we rent out gear (or buy it flat-out if its cheap enough) and put it through a 2-4 week test in various situations (read our methodology for reviewing gear)
• No-BS Guides & Tutorials: Not interested in purchasing new gear, instead preferring to learn and master what you have? We’ve covered (almost) every topic related to both APS-C and full-frame bodies! Not only that, but we’ve delved into editing tutorials and general/overall photography advice.
• Latest News: Although we are first-and-foremost a review & guide site, we do cover major updates in our newsletter. You can join our newsletter, and expect an email about twice a month filled with all the latest gossip (perhaps that’s not the right word…) in the Sony ecosystem.

Meet the Team

This is where I’d write a fancy blurb about our awesome and diverse team. Well… I’m actually doing this whole thing by myself.

My name is Chance, and I’m the sole writer and developer of this site. I’ve been working on it since early 2019 and I’ve dumped thousands of hours into testing lenses (and occasionally bodies), writing (and filming!) guides, and chasing random HTML and CSS issues. It’s been a heck of a journey.

If you’re interested in learning more about me, my credentials and, most importantly, my photography history, feel free to go check out my huge author bio. Being a lone wolf can be rough sometimes, but thankfully it means the content on the site will always be up to my standards!

Let’s Connect

Interested in joining the community? Follow us on social media or shoot us an email (open to collabs/sponsorships/etc.).

• Email: chance@sonyphotoreview.com
• Instagram: @sonyphotoreview
• Tiktok: @sony.photo.review
• YouTube: @sonyphotoreview

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy your journey through our little slice of the internet!

History of the Site

Still want to know more? Then let’s talk about the history of the site! If you’re moreso interested in my personal photography journey, feel free to read my author bio instead. This section will cover primarily the website itself and my progression with it over the years.

Planning Stages

Let’s rewind way back to the beginning of 2019. I had just switched from Canon a few months prior, and, outside of photography, I was a bit aimless.

This site was mostly born out of boredom. I had taken a cross-country roadtrip when my car died in a spectacular fashion, and I ended up stuck in a hotel in middle-of-nowhere Arkansas for about a week with absolutely nothing to do.

I still can’t quite remember how I stumbled upon starting a website. I think I watched a YouTube video on it or perhaps was scrolling through Reddit and stumbled upon the idea, but all of a sudden I decided that was my next move. But what the heck would I write about?

Luckily, I only had to think about it for a few minutes before I decided I wanted to write articles about my shiny new a6000. Little did I know that would eventually turn into such a big part of my life. And thus, Sony Photo Review was born.

Early Days (2019/2020)

I hopped on Squarespace, put in my card info, and bought my first month of hosting/domain (don’t worry, I use WordPress nowadays!). My first articles were absolutely dreadful, and thankfully I don’t think there is any trace of them left on the internet!

At the time, I didn’t think the site was going to turn into anything, I just wanted a fun place to share my photos and I thought that -maybe- it might grow to something at some point.

Terrible writing skills aside, I kept going, albiet slowly. I treated the site as primarily a hobby for a while, only writing a short/simple article here and there. After writing about a dozen posts, it kind of slipped from my mind and I ended up forgetting about it… until the pandemic started.

In mid-2020, I actually managed to stumble my way into a job working in Yellowstone National Park. That kept me busy and, luckily, paid my bills, but I kind of forgot about the site about later in the summer.

After a shift, sitting outside and admiring the mountains (our WiFi was awful), I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, I still have that website I started a year and a half ago, maybe I should work on it…”.

So I did. Motivation, though, as we all know, can be fleeting, so I eventually fell off the wagon again about putting out another twenty or so posts. And thus, I put down the site for almost another year.

Ramping Up (2021)

I’d say 2021 is when I started to take the site a bit more seriously. Although I took another national park job (this time in Grand Teton!), I ended up writing a lot more than I expected. Even though I didn’t touch the site for a while, on some random day in August I had an incredible burst of inspiration.

I ended up writing an insane amount of content over the next month. I was still broke (and didn’t know about Lensrentals yet), so I mostly wrote guides rather than product reviews (I didn’t own many lenses).

In that giant burst of content, I also sat down and took the time to migrate my website from Squarespace to self-hosted WordPress. If you don’t know what that means, I pretty much made the site cleaner, faster, and less expensive.

Switching to WordPress, for some reason, caused a sudden surge in Google traffic, and I actually started to see my first “passive” dollars roll in. It wasn’t much, but it made me realize this thing could actually work!

By the end of the year, I got busy with life and put the site down for a while. I was working on paying off some nasty credit card debt, so I was grinding away at my “normal” job plus DoorDash/Uber for like 60-80 hours a week.

Is this actually working? (2022)

Eventually, I got my awful credit card debt paid off, and I ended up just coasting casually as I hit the mid-point of 2022. I realized that I suddenly actually had free time again (what a concept!) so I decided I’d dedicate some of it to this little website that I still had cookin’.

In the summer of 2022, I dived in deep, putting a couple days a week into writing, taking pictures, etc. in an attempt to skyrocket my growth. I spent hours a day sitting in my non-airconditioned apartment sweating while pumping out article after article.

And it paid off. By the end of the year (thank you Q4), I actually started to make money that I would deem “decent”. I wasn’t living off the site by any means, but it was paying a couple of my bills every month. I was ecstatic.

Treating it Like a Business (2023)

And that takes us into 2023. Although I still don’t think I spend “enough” time writing, producing videos, or doing social media marketing, I’ve really come to treat this site as the business it is. I’ve started renting lenses, using them for a couple weeks, and then creating full hands-on written & video reviews.

I’ve branched out into a bit of social media (Instagram, TikTok, and of course YouTube) and I’ve been slowly growing my email subscriber list (if you’re subbed, thank you!). Near the beginning of the year, I bought my a7iii for two reasons: I wanted to upgrade and I also wanted the opportunity to cover full-frame glass.

This is still, to this day, a one man show. I haven’t hired anybody, I do all the writing myself, I test all the lenses myself, etc. It can be exhausting at times, but, at the risk of sounding full-of-myself, I don’t think I really trust anyone else to sustain the same level of quality that I’ve achieved with the site.

What’s next? (2024-??)

So what is next? What are my plans going forward? I honestly don’t really know.

I definitely plan on continuing to rent lenses and create in-depth, honest reviews on gear. I certainly plan to keep writing more guides & tutorials (for specific cameras and general photography advice).

Going forward, I’m planning to give a bit more attention to YouTube. Not only does adding video add more “value” to my articles (some people prefer to watch over read), but it also helps me diversify. They say you should never put all your eggs in one basket, and I’d say that’s especially true with an internet content business.

In any case, that’s a briefly summarized history of the site. I’ve been building this thing for years all by myself. I can’t lie, I’m pretty proud of it at this point.

Thanks for reading. If you’re interested more in my history as a photography, feel free to go read about me.