About IR

Home › About IR

Welcome to our site, and thanks for visiting!

I'm Dave Etchells, the Publisher of the Imaging Resource, and the "Dave" you see mentioned here and there around the site. I actually thought about doing a site like this as far back as 1993, but didn't get it launched until April 1, 1998. (No joke - It's grown steadily since then, and these days, we get more traffic in a peak hour than we got the entire first month we were in operation.

I've been a photo hobbyist most of my life, and have worked professionally with digital photography and digital imaging since about 1991. My early social development was doubtless impeded by the endless hours I spent sloshing chemicals in my basement darkroom in high school. It all turned out OK though, as I ended up finding a lifemate with great tolerance for techie strangeness, not to mention the infinite patience needed to put up with having her husband point digicams at her for hours on end. (My wife Marti is the long-suffering model in my standard Indoor and Outdoor Portrait shots.)

My professional career has been a patchwork of technical jobs of various sorts, from semiconductor physics and IC fabrication in the Aerospace industry, to computer systems integration, graphic arts, and a hefty chunk of marketing and R&D consulting around the photo industry. These days, this site occupies virtually all my waking hours, despite repeated promises to my wife and family that I really *am* going to get a life soon.

In my more or less nonexistent "spare" time, I enjoy woodworking, electronics tinkering, hiking, working with guys from the Men's ministry at my church, and of course photography. (Although spending 12-14 hours/day testing and writing about digital cameras makes me a lot less keen to pick up a camera again on the one day/week I try to take off.)

I don't do the site alone though, as I get a lot of help from my family, and a small cadre of mostly part-time workers scattered about the country. (We're based in the Atlanta, GA area, but my co-workers range as far afield as California and Toronto, Canada, thanks to the internet.) Besides being Chief Model, my wife Marti also handles the bookeeping and shipping and receiving of cameras for testing. My college-age sons Chris and Arthur used to help with some of the test shooting and back-end database work for the site, although we've now lost both of them to college. Outside the family, Yazmin Wickham does most of the page layout and database coding, Stephanie Boozer helps with a lot of first-draft writing, Mike Pasini runs the newsletter pretty much single-handedly and helps with Perl coding, Mike Tomkins does the News page and helps with writing and editing, and Shawn Barnett serves as Senior Editor and Design Czar. Luke Smith runs the test studio, and handles a lot of the gruntwork of the endless timing and power tests, etc, newly assisted by Jim Tanner, a retired physics professor from Georgia Tech. (Thereby making me no longer the most technical guy on the team, by a wide margin.) That sounds like a lot of people, but there still somehow always seems to be way more work to go around than time to do it in.

Seeing the millions of site visitors streaming through on their way to buying their digicams makes all the long hours worthwhile though. I frequently wish for a few less work hours, and a little more leisure time, but overall I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Thanks again for stopping by, and good luck on your digicam quest!

- Dave Etchells