Mary Lojkine
Mary is a keen photographer and self-confessed gadget freak with an attic full of much-loved devices dating back to the 1980s. She'll probably never use her Walkman II again, but she won't be parted from it. She also has power cables for three different countries...
Friday 11 May 2007, 1:00pm
The joys of geotagging
While I was on holiday I took about 1,800 photographs of ducks, windmills, Lincolnshire beaches and the Norfolk Broads. Many of them were rubbish, but that's the way it goes. I also recorded the latitudes and longitudes of all my shooting positions, not by the you've-got-to-be-bonkers method of looking up each place on a map and writing down the coordinates in a little book, but by turning on my Sony GPS-CS1 GPS logger and clipping it to my rucksack.
When I got home, it took me about half an hour to transfer all the photos to my computer, and maybe five minutes to add geo data to all the files. That's nothing compared to the eight hours I spent viewing all the files, picking out the best 90 shots, processing them in Photoshop and uploading them to Flickr.
Adding the geo data enables Flickr to put the photos on a map, so that when I'm old and senile (okay, older and more senile), I'll be able to remember where they were taken. And while I'm waiting for my brain to turn to mush, anyone who's inspired to visit this amazing beach...
...can find out exactly where the photograph was taken. It's like drawing on the wall of a cave to tell the next generation where the mammoth herds hang out, except easier and much more accurate.
Taking good photographs, on the other hand, is almost as hard as drawing a mammoth.
Comments on this post
I read the writeups on camcorders as this this the only way of pre knowledge of the quality and functionality of new breeds. However no mention is ever given to the quality of sound. For instance built in mics that o not record the sound in front of the camera are not a lot of use to people like me who want to hear the dialogue of the subject within the field of view and not the sound of my nostrils beathing gusts of air onto the top or rear mounted microphone on some camcorders. The sound quality and direction of mics is really important and no mention is made to whether or not the top mounted mics can pick up the subject being filmed satisfactory and with what kind of clarity. I personally feel that front mounted microphones will give a much better sound field than those mounted on the top. I may be wrong as I dont test cameras for a living. Regards Peter Rackham North London
Posted by Peter Rackham on Mon 23 July, 2007 7:26 PM
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