About Sarah

Sarah Holland arrived at photography writing backwards. She started as a studio assistant in Portland commercial photography — loading film, managing gear, learning the mechanics of professional shoots — not as a shooter who eventually wanted to write, but as someone who realized early that the gear side of photography fascinated her more than the creative side.

When she pivoted to freelance writing in 2014, she brought four years of hands-on studio familiarity with her. She had loaded enough Profoto packs, adjusted enough tripod heads, and helped enough working photographers troubleshoot equipment mid-shoot to understand how gear performs under real working conditions rather than controlled tests.

Over eleven years of writing, she has published more than 400 long-form articles on photography gear across PetaPixel, various photography newsletters, and her own editorial projects. Her approach is deliberately sourced: she references DPReview testing data, cites B&H specifications, quotes community consensus from Reddit's photography forums, and is explicit about which claims come from her own ownership experience and which come from the broader pool of documented user experience.

She owns a Fujifilm X-T4, which she has shot with since 2021, and an older Sony A6000 she keeps as a lightweight backup. She is not a professional photographer — she does not take client work, does not shoot weddings or portraits for hire, and does not pretend to expertise she doesn't have. She knows what makes a camera good for the buyers she writes for, because she has spent 11 years documenting how photographers actually use the gear they buy.

Curated Cameras is her attempt to write the buyer-side photography gear resource she wishes had existed when she started out — research-based, sourced, honest about trade-offs, and written for people who want to make a good decision rather than just the most expensive one.