Bruce Hutcheon: Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is Bruce Hutcheon, your host. Today I have Gary Elliot who is the owner of Outdoor News & Reviews as seen on Facebook.
Gary, say hello to our listeners.
Gary Elliot: Well, hello Bruce and listeners. How are you today?
Bruce Hutcheon: Hey, we're doing great and we're excited to have you on the show. Let's just jump right into it and talk to us about what you hope to do for the outdoor community with your Facebook page.
Gary Elliot: Well, I started it in 2008. I got reintroduced to the outdoors again, and hunting, and archery, and I wanted a way to learn all the new techniques, all the new products out there. So I started blogging. I started writing product reviews. Soon, getting requests and feedback from one of the owners of bowhunting.net. And as time went by and I learned to write a little bit better and produce things, Rich allowed me to write for his bowhunting.net. I've also, along the way, been able to write for bowhunting.com on occasion and the blog has just grown. Companies have allowed me the opportunity to write about outdoor products and hunting.
Bruce Hutcheon: What type of products are people really interested in in the world of whitetails?
Gary Elliot: Bows, especially. I think now, marketing, we've gone as far right now with technology and materials. So marketing has us wanting faster bows. Now we've got new colors introduced to the market. So people are able to pick most any color they want. Technology allows us to even take those old bows.
It's not quite sandblasting but recoat those old bows and bring them back to life and make them the colors we want. We don't have to have the high poundage bows that we used to have to shoot to get any kind of speed or distance out of them.
So I think trail cameras are big now, not only to the hunter, but I think to just the avid person feeding whitetails, enjoying watching them feed and be in their backyards. The apps that are coming out are phenomenal for trail cameras. It allows the average whitetail hunter and everyone to have multiple cameras, monitor them, put them in, organize them, from moon phase to time of day, to date, everything.
So I think with technology, as it is in any avenue, there's good things and bad things, but I think there's a lot of good things coming from it at this time. So I think whitetail hunters, they are looking for that new thing, that new technology, and when they do, depending on how well it's marketed, they eat it up.
Bruce Hutcheon: Gary, have you checked out Jon Livingston's deerlab.com?
Gary Elliot: Yes, I have. I actually have talked to him at the ATA shows and spoke to him about that. We're getting ready to do a review on it, and I don't have that many cameras to really make it worthwhile but I have a friend who does. We're getting together. We're gonna start putting something together. It's a phenomenal piece of software and database-driven.
For a person that loves to micromanage their cameras and their data, it's definitely something worth looking at.
Bruce Hutcheon: We had Jon on the show a month or so ago and just incredible information what he can tell from the date stamp on that photo of that buck and the doe in the woods.
What was some of the impressive things that you saw that is immediately transferable to the whitetail hunter?
Gary Elliot: Boy, there's so much from that software that you can narrow it down to what deer are coming in at certain moon phases. You can utilize it if you want to know what time of days that you have to hunt and what are available. You can go by time stamps and see at what stamps you have what deer coming through.
It's just phenomenal what the guy has done with...