Single-Serving Photo

Just like HAM radio enthusiasts (of which I am one, by no coincidence), photographers tend to be whores for equipment. If there is one thing that’s more exciting than actually taking pictures, it’s buying all the equipment you think you need before even going out there. Some call it “retail therapy,” which is a deceptively medical phrasing for “it feels really good to buy stuff, and I enjoy feeling really good.”

Whether you need this junk or not is a completely different question, and one that I could certainly answer for you, but I doubt you’d listen to me. Who am I, anyway, other than another guy who loves buying stuff he doesn’t need?

You know who you should listen to? Scott Bourne.

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over five years now, which seems like a long time to me, but Scott has been writing about and teaching photography for six times that long (yes, thirty years), so he deserves your attention for at least the next ten minutes… Which is all it’s going to take you to breeze through his newly updated DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide on Photofocus.

Within the Guide, Scott offers tips for choosing what to buy and gives examples of each basic type of lens in both Canon and Nikon flavors.

For all of you Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, and Minolta shooters out there, don’t worry… I’m sure there’s another blog out there for you guys! Ha ha!

But seriously, these are good tips and you should listen to what Scott has to say, he speaks from immense experience.

Scott Bourne’s DSLR Camera Lens Buying Guide via Photofocus

On September 25th, 2010—embarrassingly for me, nearly a month ago now—Single-Serving Photo turned five. What started as an exhibitionist experiment to see if I could force myself to take at least one decent photograph every day turned into a kind of monument to my own photography obsession and my fondness for sharing and learning together with the Internet.

Looking back on these five years, there are some particular posts that stand out in my mind. Many of them, as you might imagine, are irrelevant to most of my visitors. If only there was some way that I could find out which articles the Internet loves the most…

Fortunately, since mid-2007, I have been using Google Analytics to record and analyze the traffic on this site. I thought, since this is sort of an anniversary of the blog, it would be appropriate to share some of the gems from these last four years that I have on record.

Without further ado, the Super Single-Serving Wrap-Up! (more…)

When I first heard that Canon had made almost exact replica 70-200 f/4 coffee mugs for the Olympics in Vancouver, I had to have one. Unfortunately, they only made a small number of the mugs for the games, as a novelty hand-out for press photographers and such, and finding one was challenging to say the least.

But I did. And now I want to share this novelty with you, my dear reader.

Just a little warning here: these replica lens coffee mugs are not exactly cheap. Whether due to their rarity or because they’re limited-run items, they are priced more like high-end souvenirs than mugs.

Currently, the best source for these mugs is canonmugs.com, a charmingly “Engrish” site that evidently has either come into a huge collection of the original novelty mugs, or has outsourced their replication to some far-flung country. My guess is that these are actually replicas of the original novelty mugs, but I do own the Canon 70-200 mug and it’s as well-made as you would expect for such a thing.

The site also sells replica Nikon lens coffee mugs so you Nikon lovers can join the fun as well.

The only thing I wish my mug had is a real EF mount and cap on the bottom, rather than the rubber base that resembles a cap. If I could actually mount it on my camera, I could be seen nonchalantly detaching it and filling it with liquid, and that would be priceless.