A new camera, a picnic, maybe some other new technology, and a collapsing retaining wall
Jenny and I just got home after a most delightful picnic. I am working as Sound Designer for a show over in the Riverview school district (that’s in Oakmont, PA, in case you’re not from these parts). There was a tech work session today, so I was busy over there for that. I was done with my part right around 15:00. I came outside expecting it to be rainy, as it looked like it was going to rain when I went in at around 10:00. Happily, it was not only kinda sunny, but nice and warm! I jumped in the car and called Jenny immediately. We planned a quick picnic at the Connemaugh Dam.
I got home and grabbed Jenny and a few pieces of reading material, and we took off for the dam. The Army Corps of Engineers operates the dam and a small picnic area and park at the site, which is just outside of New Alexandria. This makes it a pretty short drive for us, and the place is usually pretty quiet. It’s one of our favorite quick get-away places–far enough out that we’re definitely “away” from everything back home, and close enough that we don’t have to have a whole lot of planning in place to make it happen. There’s also a Sheetz in New Alexandria right along Route 22, so we can stop there for food and drink on our way.
We pulled into the park at around 16:30 or so. It was breezy but warm, and we had a great time. There were a few fishermen there fishing down at the dam, and some kids and parents playing in the playground. The place was mostly empty, though. It was definitely a good get-away. We finally left when the sun exited behind the trees. It must have been 19:00 or so by then–it was definitely a good afternoon.
Some of you who follow me on Facebook have been reading about the new camera equipment that I was able to get. Our good friend John and his fiance’ Mari asked me to help photograph their wedding coming up in June. I was completely psyched, and I started looking at what I might want to get to help me to do a better job.
I started looking first at lenses and getting a new strobe. I was still using the kit lens that I bought with the D70s and my dad’s old Vivitar strobe. It all worked just fine–in fact, nearly all of the pictures in our photo gallery were taken with this camera and lens. I knew I was going to have to do a lot of low-light shots, though, so I figured that a faster (“brighter”) lens and a strobe capable of working with the camera’s auto-balancing technology would be a good investment.
Then I got entirely too carried-away reading about the new advances in the Nikon digital line. Then I started to think that maybe it was a good time to upgrade my camera body so that I could take full advantage of the new lenses I was going to get. Then I started to think about the stuff I might like to do in the future with photography….
Fast-forward though a few days worth or reading and thinking and talking to other people and reading some more. I ordered it, and I just went big and got all of the stuff that I thought I would need to get the job done right and let me increase my creativity. So now I shoot on a Nikon D700, and I have three beautiful lenses (24mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.4, and 85mm f/1.8), and I have a great new strobe (Nikon SB-900) with a Lightphere diffuser. I’m a happy camper, let me tell you.
That, of course, brings us to the next topic. We’ve had our little photo gallery (link above) for quite some time now. It works pretty well. I control it, so I know exactly what it can and cannot do. Of course, that also means that I have to maintain it and pay for someone to maintain the storage for it. I used to run it on one of my own boxes at home, but I’ve been trying to reduce the risk of data loss and increase system availability. That has generally meant moving to hosting services, which cost a fraction of what it was costing me to keep the hardware up-to-date, replace failed drives in the RAID arrays, etc. While that move has meant some loss of flexibility (I can’t do absolutely anything I want to the servers anymore), it has reduced my stress level tremendously. There was a point where I had services for many people running on my machines, and a DSL or power outage at home, or a failed drive or other hardware that required replacement would start a barrage of phone calls about when things were going to be back online. On top of that, I’d lose email if I was down for a little while. If I was away on a trip somewhere, then things were usually offline until I could get home.
All of this has sent me on a mission over the past year to move most of my critical services off to hosting services. Pair has been my general web hosting service of choice. They also have Pairnic for DNS name registration and DNS hosting services. The majority of our services are now hosted there, including this blog, the photo gallery, and several other websites, along with most of my DNS services. Google Apps for Domains takes care of email services for several of my domains. They do that so well (and for free!) that running my own email infrastructure simply doesn’t make sense. Now my email is more available than I am. I still maintain a server at home, where I host some experimental projects and a few sites for friends. At some point, that might have to go away, too. For the moment, though, it is still nice having a sandbox at home that is available to the wider internet. That will likely never change.
The next iteration in this migration is our venerable photo gallery. We’ve been running Gallery2 as our photo gallery software since I got tired of having to manually generate thumbnails and web pages for every batch of photos that I wanted to put online. This software finally made it easy to post a set of photos with a simple upload–it took care of parsing the EXIF data, generating thumbnails, and providing access control if we needed or wanted it. Lately, though, it has started to show some signs of wear. There are some things that it simply is not good at doing (hosting pictures in a way that enables people to buy prints, for instance, or download full-size original files for printing themselves). It also eats-up a chunk of the file space that we have at our main hosting provider (Pair). I set up a small site over at PrintRoom where I have some favorite photographs available if people want to buy printed copies of them. That’s a separate collection that requires its own bit of maintenance, though, and the space I have there is also limited. I could bump-up my package to one of their paid packages, but then I’d have to deal with how they have their galleries configured, which doesn’t really provide what I need and want.
Last night, I made the decision to test SmugMug to see if it will serve our needs. For less than I pay for only three months of hosting services, we get a year of unlimited photo storage. They take care of disaster recovery, backups, storage, etc. I can add some services if I want them to vault all of the original RAW-format files, too. They make it possible for people to order prints (and other goodies). I can create custom sites for people when I do a special shoot for them. I can set up custom prices for different items and different albums, so that I have the opportunity to make money on artsy stuff and also have the ability to have people buy prints at-cost when I want that. All in all, it seems like a good service. I’ll hopefully start moving stuff over there soon. I’m still in the evaluation stage, though, so we’ll see what happens.
Finally, just to make my day yesterday a little busier, Jenny and I heard a knock on our back door while we were eating dinner. This was odd. I went back there to find one of our neighbors from across the alley. He kindly told me that part of our retaining wall along the alley had collapsed, and that he was able to move a few of the stones out of the direct path of vehicles, but that he couldn’t move all of them. I was glad that he told me, because I wouldn’t have known until I went back to the alley myself or looked back there while driving past–one cannot see the wall from the back door or windows in the house. So, as soon as I was finished with dinner (we made gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, with a few specialty cheeses and tomatoes and onions on thick italian bread–yum!), I pulled-out the construction lights and a long extension cord and went to work. I was able to move the rest of the stones out of the alley and up against the wall. It was only a small portion that collapsed, but enough to make a mess. It looks like someone may have hit it with a car (or maybe the garbage truck bumped it in the morning when it was coming through).
Fortunately, we already knew that project was on our must-do list for this year. Now it’s just that we must do it sooner than later. Oh well.
jonathan
