Recently in GPS Photo Tours Category

Kent emailed me a few photos he took while exploring around the Cape Town area. This is what he sent.

And a few more...

This maps out the hike drive they took today, along with the photos along the way...

I'm finally getting through these photos. That darn work stuff just got in the way. Work is really an inconvenience at times! Anyway, below you will find the tracking for the photos for that day, followed by a couple of photos to entice you to visit the album itself on Flickr.

We took a really nice canoe trip yesterday down the Housatonic River in western Connecticut (and a tiny bit of Massachusetts). We drove to Clarke Outdoors in West Cornwall, CT. The total length of the canoe trip, according to our GPS, was 9.3 miles.

The section of the Housatonic we were on was very placid for the most part - only one small rapid. Normally, they would drop us off downriver, but because it’s been so dry, water levels were too low in that part of the river. Instead, they took us up-river, above the dam. We had a great time, and the weather, even though a little warm, was nice.

It’s still a little early for fall colors, and because it’s been so dry, they may not be very good this year. We stopped for dinner at a Bertucci’s in Canton, and collapsed when we got home. We are still a little tired and sore today, but we had a great time and it was still a really nice day.

Here are a few photos from the trip. Feel free to view the full photo set.

Bill, just after we had lunch

Google interactive map with GPS tracking. Your browser must support iframes for this to work!

This is from the trip we took yesterday to Chatfield Hollow State Park. It’s located in the little town of Killingworth, Connecticut. It was a really nice day and especially nice to have some time to just be with each other. I've had a cold lately and haven’t felt like doing much. This was the first day I felt decent in awhile.

I haven’t posted for awhile. There’s a lot going on in my life right now. I’ll post about it if I feel like I want to vent. For now, I’m just happy that things are looking up for me personally and that I’m getting back to one of my passions; photography.

View entire album

View entire album

Elevation Profile of trip

I love Fall. The air is so crisp and clean. There’s a slight chill in the air in the morning and everything seems so cheerful and care free. And then you go to work... but that’s another issue. :-)

Yeah I know, it’s not technically Fall yet. But try telling that to my trees outside. They are getting in full swing. We are going to try something a bit different this year for viewing the Fall colors. We are going to take a canoe trip and view them from a river. I’ll probably pack a lunch and we’ll stop somewhere to have lunch, taking photos along the way. I’ll include more details on that later. Then a week after that, we are off to the Portland, Maine area for Kent’s birthday.

On Saturday, after the morning rain showers had cleared off, we went out to Mashapaug Pond to just take a leisurely walk through the wood. Below is the interactive map with the photos that we took. We had a great time.

Then yesterday, we went to Newport, Rhode Island for the 10-mile Scenic Tour. We wanted to do it a few weeks ago but decided to wait for a nice sunny day. Well, that day was yesterday. It was gorgeous out and prime weather for beautiful seascapes. I’m working on the photos and will publish them most likely sometime this week.

Other than that, things are going well. I’m already looking forward to next weekend when we do that final lawn mowing and tidying up around the house to get ready for winter.

NOTE ABOUT THE INTERACTIVE PHOTO MAPPING BELOW:

1) to use this functionality, your browser must support Inline Frames and be configured to display them.

2) If you are a subscriber of email alerts from this website, the interactive map will not work in your email client. You need to click on the TITLE of the email entry to take you to the original entry on the website.

3) The more you zoom in, it will start to separate photos into their true position. If you are zoomed out a bit, it may say that there are 5 photos in one location. If you zoom in on that same location a bit more, you will see that there are actually 3 photos taken in one location, and a few feet away, the other two.

4) The map looks really cool in “Hybrid”.

We have arrived!!!!

ok... where to start....

I’ve already told you that we bought a GPS unit to hook to my Nikon D200 (to do this, you need a camera that is GPS aware). I hooked the GPS up to the camera, so as I take photos, the location of the photo is recorded in the EXIF data.

We took our first live trip yesterday to Penwood State Park, a place we haven’t gone to in ten years. Once we parked the car, we hooked the GPS to the camera, and turned on tracking; a way the GPS unit keeps track of your entire hike.

After the trip, I downloaded the photos, as I always do, and prepared them for upload to Flickr. I created a Penwood State Park album, etc. I also uploaded to my website the tracking map file from the GPS unit. With that tracking map file, along with the Flickr photo set ID, I was able to link the two into the map you see below.

The really exciting part of all of this (for me), is that, unlike in the past where I would post a few photos of a trip, along with a link the full album, here...

all the photos of the trip are accessible from this one map
you can click on any hot spot area (the pink numbers), and that will walk you through the photos
if you click on any photo in the “walk through”, it will display a larger image of that photo (click again to go back to the map)
if you click on a photo to enlarge it, at the bottom is a link to the full Flickr album.

And of course, since this is a Google map application, you have the full Google mapping controls built in, such as zoom, hybrid, satellite, move the map around, etc. Here’s the elevation guide (again from the tracking file), followed by the interactive photo map.

NOTE ABOUT THE INTERACTIVE PHOTO MAPPING BELOW:

1) to use this functionality, your browser must support Inline Frames and be configured to display them.

2) If you are a subscriber of email alerts from this website, the interactive map will not work in your email client. You need to click on the TITLE of the email entry to take you to the original entry on the website.

3) The more you zoom in, it will start to separate photos into their true position. If you are zoomed out a bit, it may say that there are 5 photos in one location. If you zoom in on that same location a bit more, you will see that there are actually 3 photos taken in one location, and a few feet away, the other two.

4) The map looks really cool in "Hybrid".

Well, we finally did it. We took a hike today at Valley Falls Park here in Connecticut. We took our new GPS unit with us, hooked it up to the camera, and off we went on our hike. I just took photos along the way as usual. But now, as I take the photo, the camera gets the photo location from the GPS unit itself. I then uploaded them to Flickr and viewed the map. This was the result.

The next thing I want to accomplish is to turn on the tracking feature of the GPS unit. With that, I can upload it and actually have it draw on the map exactly where we hiked. Pretty cool, huh?

Here's a few photos from our day...

View entire album

View entire album

I’m trying to simplify one aspect of digital photography. When you upload photos to Flickr, it’s actually quite a process for me. I have to....

examine each photo to see if it passes my standards
if it passes, convert the RAW image (what the camera captures) into a JPEG file for Flickr
place it into a Flickr album (usually a new album)
label each photo and add appropriate tagging
set the viewing permissions
place where they are on the map (geotagging)
add them to a collection

It’s that part in bold red that I’m concentrating on. When I take photos, I kind of have an idea where I took them. I can come up with a pretty good guess on where to put them on the map. Of course, this is only a guess and is not accurate in terms of the real location of that photo.

For example, when we were in Olympic National Park, we took many hikes to view different things. Along the way, I would take a photo of a flower or some other subject. When I finally uploaded the photos to Flickr, I would never know where each photo was taken. All I knew was that the photo was taken on a certain hike. The result was that a group of photos for that hike would be lumped together on the map, usually at the ending destination. And even then, since trails are not marked on a map of the park in Flickr, it was a very rough guess on where they were placed. It would look like this.

In reality, there were photos all over the place. So, what to do about this? Well, this weekend, we bought a GPS unit that should help in this endeavor. It’s a bit complicated, but I’ll simplify it a bit.

When you place images on the map in Flickr, all you are really doing it changing the photo information to record the longitude and latitude of the photo. The GPS unit can much more accurately record that information than I can. The trick is to get it to talk to the camera. As the photo is being taken, the GPS unit will update the photo information with the coordinates. This information will be included with the photo when it is downloaded and converted to a JPEG file in preparation for uploading to Flickr. With the location data loaded, the photo should show up on the map at more or less (within a meter or two) where that photo was taken.

The end result will show a scattering of photos along the trail, instead of all grouped together. In theory, if someone wanted to get back to that exact subject that I took, they could. This is what is required.

The DVD lesson guide was unbelievable. I learned so much from it. If you have a Nikon and are trying to learn all the things your camera can do, I highly recommend getting your hands on a Magic Lantern video. It’s well worth the money.

At the top right, you will see the MC-35 GPS Cord. This connects to the Nikon camera and provides a nine pin serial connector. This provides a connection for the “PC interface cable” on the lower right. That cable connects to the GPS unit. Once the connection is established, my camera should acknowledge that a GPS unit is connected. The “GPS” display will blink briefly, then go solid in the camera view finder. This means that any photo taken will have the GPS coordinates recorded. And then of course, we need the GPS unit itself (bottom left).

After a lot of research, we found that the Garmin units were the best, and the one with the best reception for isolated areas was the 60CSx, with it’s large and powerful antenna.

Oh, and the other cable (shutter release cable) was a throw-in cable for me. It connects to the camera (or the port on the MC-35 GPS cable) and will release the shutter without touching the camera, which is absolutely necessary when taking macro photography, or for photos taken in low light conditions where a long shutter speed is necessary.

So that’s it. I haven’t actually done this yet. We have the GPS unit. What is on order are all the cables to make this happen. Will it all work? It should. People are doing it, using these cables.

I can’t wait for them to get here!

Yeah I know... I’ve been absent for awhile. Work has been consuming me somewhat, but I’m on the road to re-focusing my life a bit. I’ve covered what has happened at work, so I’m not going to re-visit it. Suffice to say, if you let work control your life, it will.

So for the sake of not letting that happen, I’ve completely taken this weekend off to do very little. We did go to the mall yesterday however. When I take photos, I eventually upload some of them to Flickr. That’s all well and good. The only issue I have is the geo-tagging of the photos. I like to place them on the map in Flickr so that people can kind of see where the photo was taken. It’s an approximation of course. And sometimes, as was the case with Olympic National Park, where you are on an undocumented trail (as far as Flickr is concerned), it’s difficult to actually place the photo. What you end up doing is to place the entire set ... somewhere on the map. In reality, each photo has it’s own unique location as many were taken while on the way to see something else. It would be nice to actually be able to see, within a few meters, where the photo was taken.

So, I’ve been doing some research on how to do that. Some GPS units will connect to a Nikon D200, if you have the right cables. Supposedly, the camera will be aware of the GPS being connected and will tell me this by a solid “GPS” indicator on the camera. Then, when I take a photo, the location will supposedly be recorded in the EXIF data within the photo, which also is sent to Flickr when I upload a photo. That SHOULD do it for me.

The complicated part is finding the right cables, and GPS units that are compatible with my camera. I’ll let you know what I find out. It would be totally cool to have a map of each photo along a hiking trail, similar to bread crumbs of where the photos were taken.

And speaking of my D200, it’s still in the shop.

Other news...

We went to a nice restaurant Friday night. It’s called Chikurin, located in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Actually, a former co-worker took me there awhile ago, and I liked it. Then, last Friday night, Kent was on his way home from Salt Lake City. He stopped by work around 5:30, and I decided to take him there for dinner to see how he liked it. The food was good. I love their curry’s. The only downside was that some guy kept glaring at us like he wanted to do us physical damage. Kent mentioned it after we left. I didn’t notice it, but it made him uncomfortable.

If anyone has experience with hooking up a GPS to a Nikon camera, I would love to hear your suggestions. Oh, and finally, I’ve joined the Connecticut Flickr Meet Up Group (thanks to James for suggesting it!). It’s a group of photographers in Connecticut who meet monthly at a different place for photography. It should be fun. I have a birthday party to go to next Saturday, but I hope to make it for my first meet up with them.

Have a nice day everyone!