In 1982 (Year of my birth), two brothers, Bruce and Winston Dorbowski created a toy camera called the Hipstamatic. This was a plastic toy camera, which is rumored to have sold only 156 units. Looking through ebay, I could not find a single Hipstamatic, so this is obviously a very rare camera. In the photography world, the last few years has seen a rise in retro photography. There are hundreds of Photoshop actions made to achieve the look of a retro photo, in fact it’s being used so much it’s starting to lose it’s meaning. None the less Hipstamatic photography has become a sought after look by amateurs and professionals alike.

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About 2 years ago I purchased my very first Nikon D40x DSLR camera without even knowing what a DSLR meant. Being frugal in nature, I was trying to find ways to save money on my up and coming wedding by purchasing this camera. I mistakenly believed that I could find a friend that was competent enough to help me out, but as I used the D40X myself I realized the challenge in mastering it. I never did find a friend that I entrusted enough to capture my whole wedding, but what I did gain was a new found interest in digital photography. Since than I’ve come a long way in my photography education, and it would be my honor to plant my seeds inside of you, my seeds of knowledge.

In this article I will explain 2 important camera settings that will allow you to control camera exposure, and they are called the Aperture and Shutter Speed. And for those who don’t know, under exposure is when your image is too dark, over exposure is when your image is too bright. Our goal is to get the perfect exposure, which is the middle ground of over exposure and under exposure.

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I’ve been using mysql professionally for a little over 2 years now, and have found it increasing inadequate for humongous databases. I had first hand experience with this when building out a 7 million record database for a client of mine. I did resolve some of the issues by placing the proper indexes in the table structures, but it still had underwhelming performance issues when it came to the keyword searches. As I knew the client didn’t have the funds to have me solve this issue, I just left it the way it was.

But as a person who is always trying to seek answers to my problems I felt the need to do some investigative research. How are websites like Google able to have billions and trillions of records, and still have fast and responsive queries? It took me a while, but I discovered Apache Solr as the answers to my prayers. Based on the Lucene Search Engine, Solr is able to handle databases into the billions of records. The only catch to using Solr is that you must be on a server that has java. The only servers that allow java are dedicated servers, which can cost up to $200 a month. So obviously this search application is not for your average run of the mill website, but what kind of run of the mill website needs millions or records anyways?

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