Finally Uploaded Year-Old Pictures!

I finally uploaded pictures from over a year ago to my gallery, as well as those from a more recent trip. Both galleries are cross-referenced on my Photo Map, too.

So, now you can see orcas and bald eagles along with a fresh dose of mountain goats...

I finally did some GeoTagging

Went out on the kayak on the body of water formerly know as Town Lake (which now bears the official moniker of Lady Bird Lake). I have a waterproof housing for my Canon PowerShot G10, and have a nice waterproof bag that fits the Droid. So, both key pieces of GeoTagging field technology were safe on the water.

I fired up MyTracks (an Android app) at the dock and ran a GPS trace of the 2 mile bridge-and-back roundtrip. During said trip, I took a few photos of birds, turtles, and the city. So, now I had a set of photos on one device, and some GPS data on a different device. "How ever shall you properly GeoTag the photos and subsequently display them in an interesting or useful manner?," you may ask. "Furthermore," you may point out, "you seem to have forgotten to synchronize the camera's clock with that of the phone/GPS logger." The answer and solution are both relatively easy:

1. Fix the lack of synchronization:
• Later that night, I took simultaneous pictures with the phone's camera and the actual camera. To minimize the difference caused by lag, I "pressed halfway" on both devices and therefore got as close as possible to popping the shutters "at the same time". With the approximations that will happen later, a few hundred milliseconds isn't going to be significant.
• (Subject and actual time relative to the rest of the photos don't matter -- this is just establishing the offset between the two clocks.)
• (NOTE: Simultaneous shooting of a common subject is also a great technique for dealing with situations where there are multiple cameras involved in a shoot.)
2. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which makes correcting the time offset simple. In my case the Canon hadn't been adjusted for the end of daylight savings, and was off by a couple of minutes, even if the hour had been correct.
• In Lightroom, I examined the metadata for the phone's version of the "common picture," and noted the capture time.
• I then selected the set of pictures from the Canon -- starting with the "common picture," and Shift-clicking back to the first one in the series that needed to be corrected.
• Lightroom has a function for modifying the date and time, and if you apply a correction to this type of selection, it is clever enough to know that you want to change them all by the same offset, versus setting them all to the same exact time. This is a nice, big, timesaver!
3. Since I was already in Lightroom to fix the captre times, I processed the RAW photos from the Canon, and exported them as JPGs (because most of the cost-effective/free GeoTagging apps don't really handle RAW files).  
4. So, now I had the photos, but I needed the Geo data...
• MyTracks lets you export a GPX trace file to your SD card. 
• Copy that over to your computer because most tagging apps know how to use GPX.
5. I used a Mac app called GPSPhotoLinker to stick the location information into the EXIF data for each JPG file.
• This program lets you load the GPX trace file and the images, and then you can apply the location data either manually or as a batch process. 
• It will also interpolate the location based on the time, and give you a better estimate of the location when there isn't a perfect 1:1 match between the time a picture was captured and when a point in the trace file was recorded. (Of the 13 photos I tagged, only one lined up exactly -- and that was sheer luck.) 
6. So, now I have pictures that are technically GeoTagged, and I can stick them in a traditional gallery. But that's not the best way to benefit from the location data...  
7. Enter JetPhoto Studio, which can not only export a KML file that you can modify to use absolute paths and then overlay on a Google Map (I didn't modify this file, so the pictures use relative paths and don't show up in this view), but also uses this to build a fully functional Google Maps-based web gallery that can be easily uploaded to your site.
8. The results are pretty cool. If you want to see larger renditions, the "traditional gallery" does still have its uses ;^)

Just a test

Seeing if my moblogging client can handle an image upload...

Note: Picture of Lady Bird Lake, taken with my Droid.

Photo Backups -- Found a solution

I had been considering several different options for generating a backup of my photos when traveling sans laptop.

There are several "viewer" devices out there, that have a screen as well as a drive. I have found these to be somewhat universally overpriced (especially if you want a "reasonably-sized" hard drive), and therefore could not justify purchasing any of them. Probably because everybody feels this way, the even-pricier-than-the-Epson Canon M80 was never even sold in the United States.

I also thought about the netbook option. The price would be cheaper than the Epson or (unattainable) Canon, and the screen would certainly be larger. But, the space difference vs. my "real" laptop isn't really enough for this option to make sense, and the drives tend to be tiny.

Finally, I settled on the Photo Safe II from Digital Foci. It does not have the ability to view photos, but I was able to secure a 160GB model for $105 from Amazon. It successfully slurmed both an 8GB SDHC and a 4GB CF card in a reasonable time during my initial testing. The 160GB provides adequate capacity to overcome the device's main weakness, which is that it just dumps the card to a folder during each copy operation (and therefore will create duplicates if you are doing multiple backups from the same card as it is slowly filled, e.g. over a period of a few days). The formatted capacity is ~149GB, which can handle more than 18 copy operations with a full 8GB card. In other words, it should be enough to handle almost any reasonably-probable trip...

Coords Clipboard (Adding RMNP to my Photo Map)

Chapin Creek Trailhead on Old Fall River Road will be the designated set of coordinates by which the Rocky Mountain National Park photo gallery shall be identified.
According to Google Earth, that's here (DMS format):

• 40°26'5.14"N
• 105°43'46.67"W

Or, in photo map friendly terms, converted courtesy of the FCC:

• 40.434761
• -105.729631

Physical Remote Flash Photo Hack

The image fulgurator is a pretty slick little science project. It uses a slave trigger, a quality flash unit, and a converted camera-cum-projector to alter flash photos in real time...

Map Update and Blogger Annoyance

Updated my Photo Map with Grand Canyon and Zion place markers.

Tried to log into Blogger with Opera 9.5, because it was open at the time. Doesn't work, so I had to open Firefox.

Finally added latest placemark to Photo Gallery Map

Having just received my new copy of CoPilot Live 7 for my new WM6-Pro phone, I had GPS on the brain again. This caused me to recall that I hadn't added a Tampa-related placemark to my map of photo galleries. So, as the screen grab below indicates (if you have super-human eyes with action-movie approved secret government fractal-based near-infinite real-time zoom capabilities), I picked a spot near the pier @ Clearwater Beach to receive the "honor." I have also downloaded a couple of geo-coding toys, and realized that my Garmin Edge 305 bicycle GPS device can also serve quite nicely as a datalogger... Watch out for a future geo-coded project of some sort...

GigaPan-tastic

Hopefully, the consumer GigaPan robotic mount will come out of beta soon, but will have a cost similar to its sub-$300 beta price. Sure, you can accomplish the same thing manually, but having a motorized automated mount would be pretty darn wicked! It's also pretty cool that you can browse a growing library of these interactive images not only on the GigaPan site, but also in Google Earth (minimum version 4.2).

Photo Map Updates

Added a few gallery links to my (Google) photo map:

• Glacier National Park (Placemark @ Logan Pass)
• Saint Louis (Placemark @ The Gateway Arch)
• West Virginia (Placemark @ The New River Gorge Bridge)
  

Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has graduated from beta, and has sucked a $200 pre-order out of my bank account. I've been using the beta for over a year on both Windows and, more recently, the Mac. I'm sure Aperture is nice, too; but the tools and features of Lightroom met my needs and the bounce across platforms didn't require re-learning. I use it as an image library and a RAW processing engine.

Now, I just have to wait for Photoshop CS3 to come out, and I'll be in image-manipulation Nirvana....

Photo Gallery and Map Updated

Now that my photo gallery from Costa Rica has been posted, I have also updated my photo map to have a link to this gallery. The place marker is based off of a GPS read that I pulled from the top of Poás Volcano, near the main crater.