Saturday, March 08, 2008

Longing for home

Late last year I made a slideshow incorporating some photos I had made in Iran. I had made it primarily for friends, and assumed that it would not be of particularly great interest to anyone. How wrong I was! Recently it exploded in popularity, with tens of thousands of people viewing it.



The feedback I received from Iranians living abroad was encouraging. Some said how they were moved to tears. Some talked of their childhoods, and others of their planned trips home. From this I realized expatriates can be very much moved by images of their homeland, especially by imagery which is outside the mainstream that they can easily see everyday.

I had originally hosted the website on which this slideshow is located on a webserver in Aotearoa New Zealand, using the company OpenHost NZ. I found their service to be excellent, and I can highly recommend them. There was a problem, however. Given the bandwidth constraints of hosting a website in NZ, I had to quickly find a hosting provider outside of NZ. OpenHost NZ worked constructively with me and I found a new one in the US, where bandwidth limits are practically non-existent in comparison.