This tip is probably obsolete for most of my photographer friends shooting digital nowadays, but … I just discovered that a 55mm lens, aperture wide open, makes a nice loupe if you don’t have a real one handy. That is, looking directly through the lens—not with it attached to a camera.

I’m doing a lot of scanning these days, so it’s critical to be able to check sharpness, etc. before popping the negative into the scanner or you end up wasting a lot of time previewing when you can just click “scan” if you know it’s good. Look for a post on scanning workflow sometime soon. It’s definitely a work in progress.