Stan Horaczek is the executive gear editor at Popular Science. He oversees a team of gear-obsessed writers and editors dedicated to finding and featuring the newest, best, and most innovative gadgets on the market and beyond. He lives in upstate New York with his family, a three-legged dog, and a truly unreasonable collection of hundreds of vintage film cameras and lenses.
Stan took over as the technology editor at Popular Science in 2017, but transitioned to covering gadgets and new products full time as the senior gear editor in 2021. He started writing about gear more than 15 years prior as a contributor for Maxim magazine and the online editor for the gadget-focused Stuff magazine. Since then, he has contributed everything from super-short blurbs to long, reported features centered largely around the consumer electronics space. He has been to more than 10 Consumer Electronics Shows and only just recently finally threw away his badges. Stan is also the go-to person for everyone he knows when they’re seeking buying advice on a product. He’s always glad to help, but he’ll warn you that his answer will probably be way more in-depth than you expected (or wanted). That’s especially true for cameras, as Stan has worked as a freelance photographer since the early 2000s and also serves as the senior gear editor at PopPhoto.
Stan graduated with honors from NYU’s department of culture and communications, which was headed up at the time by the late, great Neil Postman. Stan’s concentration was “new media,” which included some very useful insight into the rise of the internet, as well as some less useful classes such as Web Design Using Flash.
Photographic film works thanks to silver halide crystals suspended in a gelatin based emulsion. Exposing and developing the film converts some of those crystals into metallic silver while others get washed away. So, every black-and-white photo negative is essentially a microscopic sculpture of the scene you captured made from metallic silver. A perfect mix of art and science.
