Ricky Moorhouse

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TheCompoChallenge - Photography

photography TheCompoChallenge

For 5 weeks, Hiro ran a photography challenge series with the aim to focus on different techniques in photographic composition each week. I joined in from the start and found it really insightful to try and use the particular techniques during the week as I took photos. Some of these were much harder to find opportunities for than others and it was interesting to see other peoples photos shared on social media during the challenge as well.

Here are the photos I took with each technique during the challenge (and a couple I added in subsequently)

1. The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds challenge is all about getting your subject out of the middle of the frame.

2. Lines

Leading lines are lines within the frame of your shot that naturally draw the viewer’s eye to your subject.

Diagonal lines accomplish something similar but don’t always have to point directly at your subject

3. Frames

This technique asks you to find ways to create a frame around your subject in your composition. This might be a doorway, a trellis, trees hanging over a path, a window, shadows around a patch of light, and so on.

I struggled with this one - whilst I found possible frames - there wasn't a subject around to frame them with! After the week I managed to get this one with the blossom framing the building at the University of Birmingham:

4. Subject Isolation + Contrast

Contrast is a really cool element of photography that can be used a lot of different ways. It could be very visual by putting a brightly lit subject against a dark background, or color based by contrasting a bright red rose against green foliage, or even conceptual with something like capturing someone who is clearly quite happy on a bus surrounded by dour fellow passengers.

5. The Golden Spiral

The Golden Spiral technique is all about leveraging the elements in your photo to draw your viewer's eyes around the frame en route to settling on your principal subject.

Again I didn't manage to get any photos for this one but am hoping to try in the future.

Remote Gateway on Openshift

apiconnect gateway

This post should guide you through the steps on how to deploy a datapower gateway to use as a remote gateway with API Connect Reserved instance, optionally configuring the inbound management traffic through IBM Cloud Satellite Connector.

Overview diagram

Installing the Operators

To install the operators in your cluster, the steps are as described in the documentation on how to install the operators

Set up certificates

Again follow the steps for creating certificates in the documentation.

Deploy the Gateway Cluster

Deploying the gateway cluster into Openshift is just a case of creating the GatewayCluster CR - you can start from this template.

  • Create a pull-secret with access to download the datapower images and reference it under imagePullSecrets. You can download the image to mirror to your registry from the 'Download Gateway' button in the reserved instance Config Manager.

  • Create a secret containing the password for the datapower admin user and ensure it is referenced under adminUser - you can use the following command to create this:

    oc create secret generic admin-secret --from-literal=password={SET-PASSWORD-HERE!}

  • Update imageRegistry to point to your image registry.

  • Update the jwksUrl for your reserved instance, this needs to be the platform api endpoint for the reserved instance followed by /api/cloud/oauth2/certs - you can find the platform api endpoint url from the 'Download Clients' link in the API Manager interface.

  • Select and configure the appropriate profile for your cluster.

  • Create a secret with the CA the reserved instance endpoints are signed by - Let's Encrypt X2 Root CA (Download from the Let's Encrypt site) and ensure the secretName for mgmtPlatformEndpointCASecret points to this.

    curl https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrg-root-x2.pem -o isrg-root-x2.pem oc create secret generic isrg-root-x2 --from-file=ca.crt=isrg-root-x2.pem

  • [Optional] If you are routing the inbound traffic through IBM Cloud Satellite Connector, you will need to configure the hostname for the gatewayManagerEndpoint to match the private cloud endpoint hostname for your connector - typically c-01.private.{region}.link.satellite.cloud.ibm.com.

  • Apply the gateway cluster yaml

  • You can check the status of the cluster using oc get gatewaycluster. If you see any issues you can use oc describe gatewaycluster for more details.

Set up Satellite Connector [optional]

Optionally, deploy a satellite connector agent on the same cluster as the remote gateway

  • Create a Satellite Connector
  • Deploy the agent
  • Create a Connector Endpoint for the gateway management interface docs. For the Gateway management endpoint you will need the following details:
    • Destination FQDN: {gateway-cluster-name}-datapower.{namespace}.svc e.g. api-gateway-datapower.apicri-gateway.svc
    • Destination Port: 3000
    • TCP

Register gateway with Reserved Instance

Create TLS Client Profile so that the manager can trust the CA that signs the certificate for the gateway management endpoint. This can be done through the RI Config manager under TLS.

  • Create a Trust Store containing the CA Certificate which can be obtained by copying out the ca.crt from the gateway-manager-endpoint-secret and putting it in a file named ca.pem (API Connect needs the .pem extension for the upload to be accepted.)
  • Create TLS Client Profile referencing the Trust store created

Create TLS Server profiles to present to clients invoking the APIs:

  • Create TLS Key Store containing the certificate and private key to present - typically these would be obtained through an external Certificate Authority.
  • Create a Server profile referencing the key store created.

To register the gateway on the 'Gateways' tab you will need the following details:

  • URL of management endpoint: If using Satellite, this is the link endpoint URL including the port number. If not, this will be the hostname from the gatewayManagerEndpoint in the gateway cluster CR.
  • TLS Client Profile: profile created above
  • Base URL of API Invocation endpoint: The host from the gatewayEndpoint in the CR that inbound clients will use
    • TLS Server Profile: profile created above

Cherbourg

france

To finish off the holiday we spent a night in Cherbourg so that we didn't have such an early start for the ferry the next day. We spent a lovely evening exploring along the waters edge and had dinner in the hotel restaurant.