On Sunday Michele and I went to Baltimore for a quick trip to the National Aquarium. They currently have a Jellyfish exhibit on display and it was a good excuse to go out and photograph something interesting. The fish at the aquarium can be very difficult to photograph. The lighting is very low and the fish tend to move quickly. This means I ended up trashing about 90% of the photos I shot yesterday. Most of the time I was shooting at 1250 ISO and I probably should have gone higher to get some more shutter speed. Most of the time I was at f4 and only getting 1/20th or 1/50th and I needed 1/200th or faster.

However, the Jellyfish exhibit had better lighting and they are slow movers. So my percentage of keepers in this area were far greater.


Here is another small jelly from the exhibit. These small jellies are only about 1-2 inches long and would hold still for long periods of time.


The lionfish were also very cooperative and would hold still displaying their fins.



The trip to the aquarium was a nice break for a Sunday morning. It didn't prove to be a great photographic adventure, but it was nice to get outside on a cold day and spend some time with Michele.

This post is a quick departure away from photography into the technology world that is part of my day job. It may be of interest to some of you.

Today marks the start of a new hosting infrastructure for my personal domains. I have been hosting my own webserver hardware at a collocation facility for about 7 years. The remaining webserver hardware I still have at collocation is starting to show its age and I'm afraid the end is near for my last surviving box. At one point I had 5 servers in collocation when I was running a web hosting business. I closed up shop about a year ago and decided I needed to move everything off the old server hardware before it dies of old age.

I have been playing with cloud based hosting solutions for over a year now and I have tested the cloud based server solutions at Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. For my server switch I decided to go with the Rackspace cloud solution. I have used them in the past for clients and I have found they provide better support and I also like their management tools better.

The one major change with moving to a cloud based solution is that I also needed to change the operating system I used for my servers. I have been using FreeBSD as my main server OS for over 10 years. Sadly the FreeBSD platform is not widely supported in the cloud infrastructure. That may change in the future as some very smart people are working on the problem. I have been experimenting with Linux for several years and also received a Red Hat certification over a year ago. So with this move to the new server hardware I have decided to commit to moving everything over to CentOS (the open source version of Red Hat.) This move gives me the ability to stay current with my certification and also keeps my skill set more marketable in the future.

This type of hosting solution is overkill for most users, but I like having the ability to manage the server like it was my own hardware. This is one of the main reasons why I like these cloud based solutions.

If you are interested in hosting your own website, feel free to contact me and I can help point you in the right direction. In the past couple of years there have been some great advances in webserver technology and solutions and if you are interested in hosting your own website it is now easier than ever with solutions provided by companies like Wordpress .com, Squarespace.com, or Typepad.com. Many of these solutions are also available for free. If you have something to say or if you are a photographer, something to show. There is no reason why you can't have your own website.