Yes, it is true! After more than five years offline, Single-Serving Photo has returned! It’s been a long road to reach this point. Five years ago, this blog was on the WordPress platform (self-hosted), and fell victim to repeated takeovers by “script kiddie” hackers who enjoyed replacing the entire site with a hideous message of domination, obviously taking advantage of some exploit in WordPress or one of the extensions I used.

First and foremost, a happy new year to all of you, my lovely readers. Whether you check in now and then or have been a reader for several years, it is solely for you that I do this. Believe me, when I talk to myself I don’t do nearly as much editing.

Anyway, what better way to ring in the new year and to step back from the commotion of life, if only for a moment, to appreciate the bigger picture than… With a picture? A picture exactly one year in the making, in fact.

Michael Chrisman, a 31-year-old photographer living in Toronto, set up a small pinhole camera on January 1, 2010, overlooking the city’s skyline. On new year’s eve, he collected it. The developed picture is shown to the right, and I have to say, I love it.

 Dennis Calvert shares a really neat light painting technique on his blog that he calls “Man on Fire.” It basically involves creating a darkened silhouette by firing a remote flash behind a subject to overexpose the background behind them, and then “painting” in the silhouetted area with some neat little light wands. I’m sure you could do this with subjects other than people and with light wands other than the ones Dennis uses.

Today on Single-Serving Photo I’m bringing you something a little bit different. Instead of news stories about amazing photographers, press releases about equipment you can’t afford, or overbearing pontifications on the usefulness of HDR as a medium for artistic expression… Drumroll please… Graphs.

To be more specific, graphs of modulation transfer functions. Dry-sounding? Absolutely! Exciting? I sure hope so!

You remember the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? NAPP? Their president, Scott Kelby, is like the Photoshop guy, he teaches Photoshop and Lightroom and travels all around the world doing seminars and evangelizing for Adobe (in an indirect way, as a representative of over 30,000 people who use Photoshop professionally). He’s as close to a Photoshop guru as you can realistically get before you become Thomas Knoll or Russell Brown.