Recent content on Sam Smith
I store all of my important (and many not so important) documents in my Paperless-ngx instance running on my homelab. Given this importance, I wanted to add an additional backup of my documents and the metadata. Having them in cloud storage, while not ideal for privacy reasons, would also give me a way to access the documents easily if I am unable to directly for whatever reason. Skip ahead to see…
Victoria Harbour Central Queen’s Road Central Tamar Street Admiralty Arsenal Street Escalators II Queen’s Road East Underpass Pei Ho Street Market I Pei Ho Street Market II Old Bailey Street Central Plaza I took these photos in June and August of 2018. A number of them were taken after I went to an opening night event for an exhibition of photos by one of my faviourite photographers…
I use my keyboards a lot, my job as a software engineer involves quite a lot of typing, I also spend quite a lot of my spare time in front of a computer. I’ve been daily driving small keyboards for a while and have been enjoying doing so. Here’s a bit about which keyboards and why I like them. I built my first keyboard in 2014, a 44 key Atreus . I used my school’s laser cutter to…
In September 2025 my wife and I spent just over 3 week in China, her first time back to her home country in 2 years and my third trip there, having been in 2017 and 2018. We spent most of our time in my wife’s home city of Chengdu, while also visited the nearby cities of Chongqing and Guiyang. This post is a collection of my thoughts and opinions on the places we visited, along with some…
I have finally bought a domain for this website and it is moving to samsm.ch . It will continue to be available at sams96.github.io for the time being but that should change at some point and will do so without warning.
Standout is a short series of shots taken in Switzerland between March 2021 and May 2024. They are photos showing telephone poles, electricity pylons, signposts, and fence posts standing out. Every photo in the series was shot on my Hasselblad 501c with either a 60mm f/3.5 CF or 80mm f/2.8 CB lens using Ilford HP5+ shot at ISO 800 and developed in Ilfotec HC 1:49 for 11 minutes. I scanned them…
If you’re writing a database query for your web service and there’s pagination, you should always sort by a unique field like ID. This should also be done on top of any other sorting. Otherwise you can get double entries or lose results across pages. A sort can be non-determinstic, as in if you have multiple items with the same value in the field you are sorting by, there are multiple…
5 years ago I wrote Rgeo , a small Go package for reverse geocoding (you input some coordinates, it gives you information about the location). Today I am putting the projected on an indefinite hiatus. That’s maybe a tad dramatic for my little project that I barely touch anyway, but I thought I should be clear about the fact that I’m not really working on it at all, and I thought…
I’ve been working on web backends in Go for the past 5 years, and on various projects of covering a range of ages from brand new greenfield projects to one built on top of a core that predates the Go language. The needs of these backends tend not to be overly complex, handling user management, payments, and a relativly simple product. They’re maintained by teams of 2-20 backend…
This year was, unlike the previous few, without any major travel. Although I did move from the UK to Switzerland, which did give me a new place to explore and photograph. Even with that I took a fraction of the number of photos I usually take in a year in 2020, which left me with not much to choose from for this selection. I chose to still put it together though because I like that this has become…
August 01 is Swiss national day, and one of the few days of the year that it’s legal to set off fireworks here in Zurich. I decided to head out in the evening with my digital camera to see the fireworks and take a few photos, primarily just for myself and maybe to put a few on my Instagram story (hence the vertial compositions). In the end I thought I had a nice little atmospheric photo…
2019 was another active year for me, with a trip to Venice in July and then a long trip to Barcelona, the U.S, Vietnam, Thailand but mostly Taiwan. I only shot colour film in Vietnam and Thailand so those won’t appear here, and my film from Thailand was actually the first film I’ve posted to a lab due to running out of chems and Corona, and they were annoyingly lost before they made it…
I was recently looking through all the photos I took during my 4 years living in Nottingham to see if I could come up with some kind of series out of them. After cutting it down to all the black & white images that turned out reasonably I had just over 200 photos so I needed to come up with some more specific ideas. One theme I tend to shoot a lot is where nature meets the built environment, which…
Just 15 months after I posted my Singapore Architecture photo series , I have decided to revisit this theme with some photos I took in New York last September. Despite what this series might suggest, I did explore beyond Manhattan but not as much because I found Manhattan to be the most interesting photographically. This series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M and CF 150mm lens, on Ilford HP5+…
Rgeo is a fast, simple solution for local reverse geocoding, Rather than relying on external software or online APIs, rgeo packages all of the data it needs in your binary. This means it will only ever work down to the level of cities , but if that’s all you need then this is the library for you. Rgeo uses data from naturalearthdata.com , if your coordinates are going to be near specific…
It’s 5 months since I posted my project Campus Lights . Sadly I didn’t manage to make any progress with getting anything changed on campus, the person I’d emailed didn’t get back to me and my exams & dissertation took precedence so I didn’t pursue it any further. I did manage to write a slightly extended version of the article for Emulsive , for which I also swapped…
Having finished my last portfolio at the end of 2017 I can now start doing them yearly, so this one covers 2018. This includes two trips to the Canary islands, one to Gran Canaria in March and another to Fuerteventura in December as well as another long trip around Asia in the summer. 2018 is also the year during which I started to become more interested in collections of images rather than just…
As an astronomy student and hobbyist, light pollution has sort of become my environmental issue of choice. Not only is it an annoyance to astronomers, but also damaging to wildlife as well as our health and is a large energy sink. I have taken particular notice of the amount of light pollution on my university’s campus lately as I am back living on campus after 2 years of living elsewhere,…
"The pariah curs were baying the moon - it was only a quarter full and nearly down by midnight, but the dogs slept all day in the heat, and they had begun their moon-choruses already" - George Orwell It was on the first night of the 3 day trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake, in a small hilltop village, at about 4 a.m when, as we discovered later in the morning, we had all been awoken by the moon-choruses…
In another attempt at post-shooting photo series creation, I have put together a collection of architecture shots I took during my brief stay in Singapore in June of 2018.
This set of images begins where the last portfolio leaves off and primarily shows my travels during the summer of 2017, with the last image being the only one outside of that. I have again chosen to stick to black and white images taken with my Hasselblad for consistency, and because it’s what I primarily use. I am planning on doing one of these with the colour photos that I’ve taken…
This is a pair of photos that I took from the top floor of a pagoda in 小鱼山公园 (Xiaoyushan park, or Little Fish Hill Park) in Qingdao, China.
This series of photographs represents approximately a years worth of work, starting in April 2016 when I got my Hasselblad. I chose to start then not because I feel that the change of camera increased the quality of images that I was producing but rather I wanted to keep the format consistent throughout. Also it was about a year after I started shooting film, and when I started pursuing…
This is the remnants of a failed attempt at a photo project looking at Birmingham’s pedestrian subways. I never really thought it was a very good idea for a project but I decided to give it a go anyway because I wanted to try shooting a project and it was the best idea that I had, also the subways are the sort of thing that I usually like to shoot anyway. Subways 1 Everything in this series…