History of The Lens Flare
In 1992, Brian learned the basics of photography using a Pentax K1000 35mm film SLR camera. He was fortunate enough to learn how to use a black and white darkroom to print enlargements and make minor corrections directly on the film.
In 1995, he bought his first computer for a mere $3000, which was a screaming fast PC with a Pentium 75mhz processor and Windows 95. Moments after turning on the machine for the first time, he whipped out his credit card and signed up for an AOL account using his ultra-slick 19.2 kbps modem. The envy was thick because everybody else only had a 14.4 modem. Soon he discovered Geocities, and with it came the ability to create a webpage. From then on, Brian's favorite pastimes were designing websites and creating photographic images.
Brian's first attempt at a website was horrible. It contained every fantasy-related animated gif on the Internet at the time, and since every file was a simple static HTML page, it was painful to update. Web pages were cool, but he wanted to have the ability to interact with his visitors, and Yahoo Clubs (now Groups) was the answer du jour. With this new addition, people could post messages to each other and stay in touch. It was wonderful, but it had its limitations.
In 1999, Brian decided to switch from a financial to a technology career, and obtained a job at a local tech support outsourcing company as an agent for an anti-virus company. A year later, he impressed enough people that they hired him to make web pages even though his knowledge was severely limited. He taught himself ASP, HTML, and JavaScript. Along with the help of two document editors, he built one of the best and busiest tech support websites on the planet. That year he also bought a Nikon N60 35mm film SLR camera.
By the time he left the company in 2003, the little team of four people was an entire development department. It consisted of two DBAs, a dozen web developers, 5 report writers, 2 project managers, and an IT director. Throughout this time, Brian learned each aspect of the development process. He started out as a web developer and webmaster and quickly became the senior web developer, then project manager, and finally database administrator.
The systems became much more complicated over time as well. At first, the entire website was hosted on a Compaq P2 Desktop computer. When he left, the busiest client's website spanned across six 1U Windows 2000 web servers and two 2U Linux database servers.
During his time as a DBA, he learned PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Perl and has been using a LAMP solution ever since (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl). Meanwhile, he was massing a stack of prints and negatives from nearby hikes in the mountains, but didn't have any real purpose for them.
In 2003, Brian was offered a salary with another company that he couldn't refuse, which turned into a nightmare. 3 months after taking the position, he was laid off due to the fact that they were running out of the Venture Capitalist's money. The IT Industry was in depression due to the infamous bubble bursting of the dot-com era, and work was impossible to find. Brian spent the time hiking, shooting photos, and looking for work. After 3 months, he landed a job at a growing portrait studio chain as a web developer and has been there ever since.
Brian wanted a way to show off some of the photos that he had been taking, and in the beginning of 2004, he created a simple gallery to do so, which was the first verion of The Lens Flare. The gallery was designed to dynamically display 200-300 photos through a simple form that uploaded the picture and took care of the files automatically. A few months later, he decided to let others upload their photos as well.
The Lens Flare now contains thousands of photos by hundreds of people. Currently, 25,000 people visit the website each month (increasing by over 10% monthly). We're constantly working to add features and improve the website. Our goal is to increase the number of visitors to 12,000 per day so we've got our work cut out for us.
Thank you for visiting The Lens Flare. We hope that you've enjoyed your visit, and that you'll come back often.
