Technology

As programming is my day job (and I wrote this website), I feel compelled to talk briefly about the technology behind Lazy Photography. People also occasionally ask me what camera and lens I use, so I've added some details on this below too.

Backend

The guts of the site are written in the Haskell programming language, and compiled using GHC. The Happstack library provides the basic web framework (URL dispatching, connecting to a webserver), and the storage engine which is used to hold the album and photograph details. The HTML pages themselves are constructed using the HStringTemplate templating library. You might find my choice of technologies odd, but I honestly think that using Haskell and Happstack has made this site more robust than it would have been otherwise, given the limited time I've spent writing it.

Frontend

As I'm useless at proper web design, I'm using the Blueprint CSS framework to get a functioning layout. I'm not too hot on JavaScript either, but I've found jQuery to be a huge help for the few areas of this site that need dynamic scripting. The Twitter feed uses Damien du Toit's jQuery plugin for Twitter, which works nicely.

Supporting scripts

What software project would be complete without a pile of Python scripts to keep the whole thing running? For this site, they manage the process of adding albums, building the rider finder index and generating PayPal buttons. I use Mercurial to provide version control for all the code I've described on this page.

Photos and other static content

The photos are resized and sharpened using ImageMagick, then sent to and served from Amazon S3 (using the hS3 library). This way I don't need to worry about the bandwidth needed to serve the photos - Amazon have more than enough, and will sell it to me cheaply. The other static content of the site is served using Amazon CloudFront, which in theory keeps page load times to a minimum.

Photographic hardware

These days I take all my pictures with a Canon 40D. Some of the pictures on here were taken with a Canon 300D, and one is an old picture taken with a Canon Powershot S45. The equestrian pictures are usually taken with a Canon EF 200mm f/2.8 L II lens, and at some events I will additionally hire a Canon EF 135mm f/2.0 L. I have a fantastic Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro lens that I use for all my close-ups, and my standard walkabout lens is my Canon EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS.

Photographic software

I always shoot in RAW format, and so should you. I've taken to using Photo Mechanic to tag and assess my photos once they come off the camera. I still feel it's a bit expensive for the features that it provides, but it's definitely the fastest software for viewing photos that I've come across. Bibble provides the rest of my workflow - I do all my cropping, colour and contrast adjustments in there.