Alik Griffin is a visual artist who graduated from UCSD with a bachelor of arts in film studies in 2005.
Since graduated he has worked as a videographer, cinematographer, editor and compositor working until settling down as an on and off freelance and full-time game trailer editor for G-Net Agency.
Today Alik Griffin is married with two kids and travels back and forth between Japan and California for work while running this blog on the side.
About AlikGriffin.com
Alikgriffin.com started as a demo reel page for editorial work that eventually shifted into a blog. In the early and mid-2000s even today knowledge about cameras, lenses and memory cards is confusion and online communities are filled with misinformation, bias and often information that is simply wrong and it’s easy for photographers to be misled into buying something that might not be right their unique personal needs.
For example, there is this hard push by many of the photographers to switch to mirrorless, yet they rarely discuss the limitations of mirrorless cameras, like the focus technology sitting behind IR and UV filters.
AlikGriffin.com was formed as an information hub to get to the bottom of the technical details about cameras, lenses or even memory cards to really allow readers to understand what they are buying and to help give them confidence in purchasing decisions with facts from detailed experiments such as memory card benchmarks, lens lists, and accessories.
Memory Cards Tests
AlikGriffin.com was the first blog to benchmark every popular memory card in every popular camera. Even today this provides readers with details about how each card performed in a particular camera. Not all memory cards or cameras are the same and these tests proved to be very valuable for the community.
Lens Reviews
Lens reviews on AlikGriffin.com take a different approach than what’s common online. Not only are the technical characteristics of lenses looked at in detail, but also a lot of attention is placed on the art and character of the lenses. These reviews focus on one of the most overlooked attributes of lenses today, do the images look good, or are the lenses just sharp?
While sharpness is important for some styles of photography, like reproduction work, it’s not as important of characteristics for most styles of photography, but it’s often the focus for lens reviews. Unfortunately, this focus only on sharpness with online lens reviews has been pushing lens designers to focus on corner to corner sharpness with their lenses at the cost of all other attributes which actually works against the photographer’s interests.
The lens reviews on Alikgriffin.com attempts to recalibrate the readers’ thinkings to look at lenses as art tools rather than just focusing on one very clinical attribute.
Camera Accessories
The third focus of this blog is with accessories. Cameras are cool gadgets and to many people, photography is a hobby. Having fun accessories that personalize cameras or lenses can really help make photography fun and keep shooters motivated.
Each camera is then looked at as a unique tool so that the best accessories can be recommended for that camera. For example, Sony screens tend to bubble up over time from all the micro impacts that happen throughout the life of the camera. With Sony mirrorless cameras, it’s often better to go with a thicker screen protector which will preserve the life of the camera.
AlikGriffin.com What’s Next
Because of the artistic focus of the lens reviews, readers are showing more interesting in color and editing techniques.
There will soon be Lightroom presets available to readers that are looking to get their images looking like the images in the lens reviews. Also, expect to see so tutorials with never before scene techniques for editing photos.
This site uses affiliate links as a source of income. This site seems massive at this point but the competition online is rough and the income is barely enough to make a living.
This site has to deal with constant negative SEO attacks, where other bloggers looking to compete with me build thousands of bad pages on topics unrelated to photography then link back here to destroy any brand authority acquired with google. A great deal of time has to be spent just to disavow these bad backlinks which takes away time for making content.
If you want to help this blog and you own a blog, a Youtube channel or are even if you’re active on social networks, the best thing you can do is just talk about it and share the information.
On Youtube
I have a few youtube channels, one that is photography focused with tutorials and reviews which can be found here: AlikGriffin Youtube
I recently started a second channel with my kids to just document their lives and their activities and their age. Something we can have forever as we get older to look back on and remember what life was like. Time goes by so faster and a video or two a week doesn’t take up too much of my time and I hope to keep doing this as my kids grow.
It’s also a great place for me to test out gear and shoot in unusual situations and test different mics, lights, cameras, and lenses in these run and gun type situations. You can find the channel with my kids here at Luka & Kalina’s Kids Show. It is a kid’s show so don’t expect anything too fancy, but I like experimenting with different gear to push production value as high as it can be.
Right now I’m using the Nikon Z6 with the Sony 16-35mm f4 adapted. If you see little focus pops, that’s why. Mic I use now is mostly the Rode VideoMicGo and for most of the videos, I record to an Atomos Ninja V, 10-bit 4:2:2 in Prores LT. Then downsample it all to a high-quality H.265 1080p at 50Mbps. It makes these 1080p videos look amazing, and it should be pretty obvious which were shot 10-bit vs 8-bit internal.
What’s been hard is trying to get the audio really nice. Since there is often a lot of background noise I or unwanted packaging/toy noises, I have to use DeEssers or DeNoise plugins in Premiere to help clean things up. I also use a bunch of plugins by Waves, like their compressors and mixers as well as their X Noise plugin when I need better algorithms.
For lighting, I just use some Rode Led Strip lights by Neewer.
Contact
There are two great ways to contact me.
[email protected] I check several times a day.
Comments from this site go to [email protected] so if you don’t want to deal with email, you can leave a comment anywhere on this site and I will see it.
The second way to contact me is through Instagram. I check my street photography account @griffinalik regularly.