Single-Serving Photo

Believe it or not, it has been precisely three years since the very first post on this blog. It started out as a place for me to post experimental photos and has since evolved into a great platform for sharing the information and inspiration that I come across all the time.

To all of you out there reading this now, thank you! I wouldn’t write all of these articles if nobody read them, and your occasional feedback has been really great, whether praise or critique.

If any of you have fond memories to share or ideas for where you’d like to see this blog go in the future, as always, your comments are more than welcome. It’s been a pretty great three years; stick around, there’s more to come.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, the Lensbaby is a “selective focus” lens made by (who else?) Lensbaby, Inc. I picked up my Lensbaby 3G (not related to the cell phone technology) what must be at least a year ago now. I could probably find out by looking up my first blog post about it, but I’m too lazy.

Here’s a photo I took in San Francisco’s Chinatown:

~~/Places/California/SanFrancisco/FashionSense.jpg~~

The reason I write again about the Lensbaby is that Lensbaby, Inc. has announced a new line of Lensbaby products and boy oh boy do they look like fun. The new Composer combines easier focusing as well as the ability to make the lens stay put without fiddling with the mechanical rails and buttons that my 3G has.

Here’s a picture of the very recognizable Transamerica building in downtown San Francisco from street level:

~~/Places/California/SanFrancisco/Transamerica.jpg~~

The selective focus is something you probably could do in Photoshop using a zoom blur filter. Nevertheless, these images are essentially untouched out of the camera other than your basic curves and cropping. It’s a lot of fun to manipulate the lens while peering through the viewfinder to see how it distorts the image and brings your attention to a certain element in the composition.

Here’s one from Boston:

~~/SingleServings/2007/June/09Jun07-03.jpg~~

And another, for good measure, also from Boston:

~~/SingleServings/2007/June/09Jun07-04.jpg~~

If you like, go read about the new Lensbaby products on their website. The lenses are not very expensive, relatively speaking, and although they are one-trick ponies, that one trick is a lot more fun than it might seem at first.