A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard
NASA’s Suomi NPP. (NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)
From the Washington Post:
Feast your eyes on it: NASA released one of the sharpest, most stunning true-color images of our planet the world has seen Wednesday.
Image capture, Google Earth, by Evan Robinson
Because I use a Canon, I don't have an easy option for GPS equipping my SLR. So if I want to geotag photos, I have to find a less integrated solution.
The cheapest solution is to manually tag photos using some kind of map software. Aperture provides the Places feature to do this. There are plug-ins (I downloaded and tested Maperture, which worked fine). Flickr lets you put photos on a map, and I imagine that other photo hosting services provide similar services.
But geotagging thousands of images manually is a pain, and it will continue to be a pain. In vernacular of my day job, it does not scale. I have thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of untagged photos, and I will be generating many more. On an ongoing basis, manual geotagging is right out.
That leaves some sort of GPS logging. There are many devices, including many if not all smartphones and standalone GPS units, which will periodically record your GPS position for later use. These log files can be imported and converted for use with Google Earth and other software to track your position over time.
I have an iPhone, and could well have found logging software for it. But I have several use cases counter to that solution, especially long periods out of phone service (camping, hiking, the Big Island, etc.). I suspect that running logging software on the iPhone would reduce battery life below my minimum needs.
So I went looking for a standalone GPS logger. My search was complicated by the fact that I'm a Mac user, of course. Google and Amazon led me to a set of five possibles (prices at Amazon):
My first test was basic functionality: I turned each device on and carried it for a day or two. The QStarz and Columbus units had a really hard time getting GPS lock in downtown Seattle, so they were out. Next was communication with my Mac. I got the other units (Amod, Holux, and Sony) to talk to my Mac. Next I compared the tracks with my actual paths. That eliminated the Amod, which apparently had trouble getting a good position even when it said it was locked on.
The Holux and the Sony passed all the basic tests. Both these units use single AA batteries (I use Eneloop rechargeables), which is a plus because they don't require special chargers or cables. Both connect using standard small USB connectors, which is a plus because that's the same cable I use to talk to my external USB drives. Both have screens, which means they don't require specialized (usually Windows-only) software to configure them. The Sony has a nicer form factor and carrying pouch and supports on-card geotagging of photos. It also connects to the computer as an external drive, which makes acquiring log files very easy (the Holux requires a special USB driver be installed and software to pull log files off the device). The Holux can be configured for more different logging options (log every 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 seconds; log in metric/english measurements; log based on distance moved; etc.) and seems to use less power. It also appears, in my basic testing, to lock on faster and more reliably. It's also about $30 cheaper. And it has the only toggle power switch in the bunch (every other device uses a push button of some kind to turn the device off and on, sometimes holding it down for X seconds to turn on and Y seconds to turn off -- a toggle switch shows you instantly whether the device is supposed to be on or off, which helps diagnose dead batteries, among other things).
The first necessary activity with the Holux is to get it to talk to the Mac. I had to install a special USB driver, the SP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Driver. Once that was done, the Holux talks to the Mac through a standard USB cable, and logs can be acquired using free software called HoudahGPS, which is a graphical front end to gpsbabel.
If you are only going to acquire log files, HoudahGPS will do you. It reads data off the Holux and converts it to several standard formats. If you want to view your track in Google Earth, for instance, this is how you do it.
If you want a standalone geotagging app, HoudahGeo ($30) is what you need. I had a license lying around from some Mac Bundle or another I'd acquired, so I didn't actually even need to buy the software. HoudahGeo includes HoudahGPS' functionality and can extract GPS information from the Holux directly, without using HoudahGPS as an intermediate.
How you use HoudahGeo will depend upon your existing workflow. I use it as part of pulling photos off my cards. I copy the files off my card to a standard location, run a couple of droplets on them to separate the images by day shot and rename them to my standard (YYYYMMDD-###, which will have to change to -#### or even -##### because of the speed of the 60D). Then I drop the resulting folders on HoudahGeo, which imports the Canon Raw (CR2) files and associates them (by timestamp) with the positions logged on the Holux. Getting the log into HoudahGeo can happen two ways: direct import from the device, or by using HoudahGPS to extract the log file from the device and then using HoudahGeo to import the log file (which is obviously more work, but it's the way I did it first, so I know that it works as well as direct import). HoudahGeo can be instructed to wipe the log file from the device after import.
There is one thing which you must verify in order for all this to work properly and relatively automatically: Your camera's clock must be closely in sync with GPS time. This is one reason why the screen on the M-241 (and the Sony) is so important: it allows you to see GPS time and set your camera time to a close match (I find that within a second or so is adequate).
HoudahGeo will automatically associate GPS position data with photos according to timestamp. Since I've set my camera time to closely match GPS time, it's been seamless. Without that match, it's a #@&%^@(# pain in the butt.
HoudahGeo is then happy to export the CR2 files with GPS information embedded in metadata (it's entirely possible that sidecar files are in use here, but I don't know and for now I don't need to know -- it just works). Once the files have been tagged with the GPS information, I import them into Aperture as a Project.
Gull Wing 20110723-019, by Evan Robinson,
Canon 60D wih 70-200mm f/4L
Click to embiggen
As I've previously noted, I recently upgraded my camera kit for the first time in 8 years. Here's the basic new gear list:
Replacing a Canon 300D (Digital Rebel), Canon 18-55mm EF-S, and Sigma 70-300mm. I'm keeping, at least for a while, my 50mm f/2.5 Sigma Macro lens and my 28-105 f/2.8 Tamron.
So why did I pick the 60D over the 7D?
The first reason I even looked at the 60D was that I had trouble finding anybody who had a 7D in stock. The Japanese earthquake and tsunami appear to have wreaked havoc on Canon's supply chain. When I could find a 7D, the body was going for a 10-25% premium over its list price. I didn't want to pay that. And I had a deadline: we're going on a trip, and I wanted a month or two to work into the new gear.
The second reason was the articulating screen. I love being able to turn the screen into the body so it's not exposed (I have a Zagg protective film on it, but still), and the potential for low or high angle viewing seems like a nice feature.
Third, the price difference. I got my 60D for list ($899, including the $100 rebate Canon has running until 3 September 2011). If I could have found a 7D for list, it would have been $1599 (with rebate included): nearly 80% more.
Fourth, the 60D uses SD cards, not CF cards. I have a small library of CF cards, but SD cards are nicely smaller, generally a bit cheaper, and my "darkroom" (a 13" MacBook Pro) has a built-in reader, so that's one less thing to carry, use, lose, and replace. And I get official eye-fi support, which may or not turn out to be a big thing.
What was I losing by not getting the 7D? 8fps instead of 5.3fps; dual DIGICs instead of a single DIGIC; 100% viewfinder instead of 96%; .122s less shutter lag; and more focus points (and more cross-type).
What else would I lose if I didn't get the 60D? About 300 shots per battery change and about 100g.
In the end, I just ended up on the 60D side. I might get a 7D (mark 2? 8D?) next time (which I hope won't be 8 years!), but this time, the availability, price, screen, and SD came out ahead of the FPS, 100% viewfinder, shutter lag, and focus points. The 60D is such an incredible technological leap ahead of the 300D that the extra bells and whistles just didn't seem important.
The other thing I've been asked is why I sprung for L lenses but didn't get f/2.8 lenses. There are basically two reasons. There's the price: the f/2.8 version of the 700-200 costs nearly twice as much. Next, there's the weight: it also weighs more than twice as much. I'm going to be hauling this basic kit around a lot. I'd love to have the more capable lenses (although there is no 24-105mm f/2.8L, you have to be content with the 24-70mm), but I won't be happy with the extra 37oz (well over a kilogram!) and the lost overlap from 70-105mm.
So why buy the L lenses to begin with? I spent more on each of those lenses then on the 60D body, or almost all the lenses I had in my old kit put together (that's a little bit of an exaggeration but not much)! Because I expect to use these lenses not just until I get my next body, but the next body after that, and so forth. Unless Canon goes through a technology change like from the FD lenses to the EF lenses, I expect to have these lenses for the rest of my life: they're not a consumable like the body, they're an investment.
With new kit and a trip planned, I wanted to get a new bag as well. I went through a bunch of options and ended up buying three and sending two back. The winner is the Tamrac Adventure 9 Photo/Computer Backpack, which beat out the Tamrac 5788 Evolution 8 Photo/Laptop Sling Backpack Bag by two features: the upper compartment on the Adventure 8 holds my iPad, and the one on the Evolution 8 doesn't. They both beat out the Crumpler Sinking Barge Deluxe which I thought was ingenious, but had a number of issues for me. Most notably, I didn't feel the dividing walls were strong enough to keep my gear in place, and it was really hard to get stuff in and out of -- which has the advantage that your gear isn't likely to get out by mistake. On the other hand, the Crumpler has by far the best waiststrap. For trips where I'm not constrained by carry-on restrictions, I use a Lowepro Classified 250AW, which I first carried at the 2008 DNC. It's big but easy to get stuff in and out of.
When I was at Glazer's (near work, and easier to fondle gear than online), I discovered the Black Rapid straps, and got myself an RS-7. It's not perfect, but it's very nice. There's a KickStarter design called the Lens Loop which is very much the same idea. It moves the camera off your neck and across your body, with some sort of ring at the camera connection, which allows the camera to slide up the strap to your face and then drop back to your side.
I find myself both very enthusiastic about taking pictures and interested in blogging in a way I haven't been, oh, since the 2008 election. We'll see about that.
Puget Sound Panorama 20110716 by Evan Robinson
Click to embiggen
I've updated my camera gear for the first time in years (my previous camera is a Canon Digital Rebel aka Canon 300D which I purchased in 2003 IIRC). So I've been out playing with the new equipment (which there will probably be more than one post about). The above is an example. The original is 9583 x 2358, made from 18 images, is 6.6MB as a JPG (pretty small!), and nearly 60MB as a TIF. Pretty much everything on it, from camera settings to Hugin settings to Aperture settings, was default.
