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!

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.

This comes up a lot; you want to take some photographs but you don’t want to be treated like you might be a terrorist. It seems like headlines about photographers being hassled and even assaulted by law enforcement are perpetually flying. A BBC spoof site, NewsArse, even put out this satirical article called Terrorists ‘sick of being treated like photographers’. If you are looking forward to photographing in a city, especially one that keeps close watch for terrorist activity like New York City does, the best thing you can do is know your rights.

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK. Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants.

To the right of your histogram that is. You do remember how to read one, yes? Slightly, ever so slightly exposing all of your photographs to the right of the histogram, which is to say slightly overexposing them, should be your goal, 100% of the time.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” —Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.