geotagging with your cellphone

HTC Droid Eris running Footprints geotagging app

Geotagging is the process of (either automatically using a tracking device or later manually) adding GPS coordinates to your photos, thereby placing them on a map at the location they were originally taken.

If you’ve been clicking through to view my photos on Flickr, you might’ve noticed that I geotag a lot of my stuff (view my map).  I mostly do it as a fun little thing the viewer can check out (if they’re so inclined) to see where some of the cool things I photograph are, in case they want to try their own hand at it or maybe are just interested in what rural Minnesota looks like.  Unlike a fair amount of people, though, I never geotag just to save the location for future reference; I can always seem to remember on my own where a specific shot was taken.

Some cameras now have GPS built-in and will record the coordinates directly in the EXIF data; some manufacturers also make attachments that do the same thing; but probably the most commonly used method in the past has been simply taking a separate GPS unit to log your steps while out shooting, and then later using a piece of software to merge the GPS data with your photos.  If you don’t take a ton of pictures or are only tagging the best ones, I find that doing it manually using something like Maperture is not too painful.

You may already have the hardware you need to get the job done, too: if you’ve bought a smartphone within the last couple years, chances are high that it has GPS built-in.  I recently picked up an HTC Droid Eris, one of the first in a new line of Android-based smartphones.  It has GPS and even comes with an app from HTC called Footprints that makes it easy to save your current location and attach a reference photo to it.  If you don’t have an HTC phone, just search the Android market or iPhone app store for “gps”.  To save battery life, look for an app that only updates your position when you tell it to; or if you don’t want to mess with your phone every time you move to a new spot, consider a continuous tracking app.

I’m currently using Footprints in conjunction with manual tagging in Maperture, but as things move forward, expect to see more sophisticated phone-based tracking applications that interface with computer image editing software to automatically tag photos, and even accessories that tether your phone directly to your camera.

week 31: album cover

Another one-off today to fill the gap until my next photography-centric outing.

I knew exactly what I wanted for this image the first time I noticed this particular train car.  On the highway heading west from Fergus Falls, there’s a set of tracks running parallel to the road for several miles; sitting motionless on this set of tracks for the past couple months is a string of grain cars, a couple of which have the names of their agricultural cooperative owners’ on their sides.  What I saw while driving past was a square crop with “coop” nestled into one of the upper corners, a sort of album cover for some non-existent artist:

Canon 40D: 70mm @ f/8, 1/400th, ISO 250

On the next drive-by, I stopped to shoot both of the railcars in question with that in mind.  I pulled over on the opposite side of the highway and used my 70-300mm lens (zoomed all the way out to give me more options when cropping later) and took no more than 3 frames of each car.  I stuck with my cheap telephoto rather than getting closer with my vastly superior wide zoom for a few reasons, chiefly because of the compression effect that a longer lens provides.  It also has much lower distortion, which made it a lot easier to get the image properly straightened in post.

I picked this car for display because I liked the style of lettering better, but I worked both of them to a finished state before deciding for sure.  I went straight for a precision square crop, throwing away probably 50% of the image before moving on to levels, contrast, saturation, definition, and sharpness.  After adjusting those settings to achieve a bleak industrial look (or at least to accentuate what was already there), I decided to try to get rid of some of the other distracting lettering using the clone tool.  There were a good 6 or 7 areas that needed fixing, and I think I can say with certainty that this is a perfect example of good cloning technique: even after being told it was done, you’d be hard-pressed to find any evidence of it.  Lastly, I went into TiffenDFX and chose a Warm Bleach Bypass, changing the temperature variation to maybe half of what the first preset defaults to.

The final combination of telephoto compression and contrasty processing creates a decidedly flat and painterly image; exactly what I was looking to do from the beginning.

week 29 2/3: at the museum

Alright, now that the upset of the holidays is well and truly behind us, I should be able to get back to more regular updates.  First I must finish off the series from last month with a brief overview of our trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

I think this may have been the first time I carried any camera with me into a museum, let alone a hardcore DSLR.  As with every other family outing where I was hoping to take some decent photos, I immediately felt rushed.  It’s hard to slow down and concentrate on making an image when you’re constantly being pulled around or in danger of being left behind altogether; even worse when it’s in an art gallery and you’re also trying to both appreciate a painting and do it justice in a photo.  At least my brother was in the same boat this time, hefting his even larger camera and looking for good angles right alongside me.

Our circuitous route took us around one of the upper floors for a few hours.  I tried to shoot everything that caught my eye, from straight closeups of photographs, paintings, and sculptures, to the people viewing them, to the space itself.  It wasn’t until near the end of our time there that I had finally figured out a theme beyond the usual way of photographing “stuff” in a museum, but I wasn’t able to capitalize on it.

During one of the times we were split up into smaller groups, I was backtracking with my mom to one of these period-decorated rooms she wanted a picture of when we passed a couple of teenage girls sitting on one side of the hallway.  They were sketching or writing about a painting hanging on the opposite wall, and I saw an opportunity.  I stopped and turned around when we had gotten farther down the hallway, expecting to stealthily compose and snap a shot in just a couple seconds and then move on, but ended up standing there waiting for a couple minutes for some of the other people in the hallway to disperse.  I’m pretty sure the girls noticed me stopped and looking in their direction, and I think they were maybe a little creeped out by it, but I had already committed, so I took my shot and left.

Canon 40D: 38mm @ f/2.8, 1/40th, ISO 800

I so rarely feature people prominently in my images that it was nice to get something a little more in-depth than a straight portrait.  I immediately went for a black-and-white conversion to eliminate the distracting element of color and focus on the shapes of the people.  I would’ve liked an even faster lens (< f/2) to further de-emphasize the figures in the background; I even mucked around in Photoshop trying to blur out that region manually, but it just didn’t work.  If I had been conscious of it at the time, I also would’ve kneeled down to get a lower angle and a better eye-line for the subjects.  Despite those niggling little problems, it still turned out very well, and the candid nature of it feels similar to my carpets photo from a few months ago, though capturing this one was not as overwhelmingly satisfying.

the best camera is the one you have with you

I’ve heard this saying a lot over the past year.  Chase Jarvis popularized it (and even wrote the book on it), his idea being that all this talk about which camera is the “best” is pointless if you don’t have it with you when a photo-op arises.  Any crappy old thing you may have on you, whether it’s your cellphone or a cheap little point-and-shoot, will take a shot infinitely better than the blank screen on your awesome DSLR that you didn’t lug out for whatever reason; it’s what you have with you that counts when it’s go-time.

I realized the other day that I’ve completely nailed part of this: I take my DSLR with me almost every time I leave the house.  After enough repetition, it’s become a habit, despite the fact that my camera bag is larger than a cinder block and weighs only a little less.

But having the camera with you is one thing; actually stopping to use it is another.  When I first started toting it around all the time, I was extremely hesitant to pull over when I saw something worth photographing.  Part of it was that I usually had somewhere to be and didn’t really have time to stop and capture whatever it was adequately (which is why I started blogging to begin with; to force myself to go out with the expressed purpose of shooting).  The other part had to do with the subject matter I was shooting: trespassing is a general requirement to get up close/into abandoned buildings, and it’s an awkward feeling the first few times you do it.

I haven’t just stopped on the side of the road to shoot some random interesting thing for quite awhile.  There’s a whole host of excuses why I haven’t, but they don’t make me feel any better about it.  Some of them can be easily dismissed with a bit of planning… others, such as less-than-perfect weather, not being able to afford the optimal equipment for the shot, or awkwardly sticking out in a place that you maybe shouldn’t be are harder to overcome.

The spirit of the Best Camera thing is that you can’t let that stuff stop you.  There will always be a better combination of equipment, time, weather, light, subjects, whatever, but it can’t make up for the empty memory card you have today.  Go shoot it anyway, and use your abilities to do the best you can do given the constraints.  And if you find that you wish you could have done better, figure out what you need for that to happen and do it.  Just don’t give up without a fight.

Hopefully I can keep reminding myself to do the same.

Canon 40D: 17mm @ f/4, 1/25th, ISO 400

week 30: christmas on campus

Alright, this is going to throw things out of order, but I really wanted to post this one on Christmas.  I’ll make it quick to keep the confusion level low.

I drive through the center of a small college’s campus on my way to and from work.  On one end of it, there’s a little park area with a pond, a neat old building, and several large conifer trees, with paths criss-crossing all of it.  They always dress up one of the trees (and the front of the building) with lights for Christmas.  I didn’t try to photograph it last year mostly because of my lack of decent equipment, but I promised myself I would get to it this year.

Canon 40D: 37mm @ f/8, 1.3", ISO 400

Even though I chose the warmest day of the week to stop, the windchill was still somewhere around -10.  The special gloves I have for just such a situation were totally inadequate; sticking my hands back into my pockets between handling the cold metal tripod and working the camera’s buttons was not nearly enough to warm my exposed fingers back up.  They were painfully cold just a few minutes into it, and despite telling myself “I can’t take any more of this; one more shot and I’m done,” I kept going for several more minutes.  The image above was one of the last I took.  I’m now looking for a good pair of ice-climbing gloves.

So what was I doing during that time?  Changing my aperture, turning LiveView on and off between changing my point of focus, changing my focal length, moving the tripod around, switching the ballhead between portrait and landscape framing, and waiting for some people to exit the frame.  The ballhead started to freeze up, too, becoming really stiff and resistant to movement even when loosened all the way.  I wasn’t really concerned about the camera, though; when I first got my film SLR, I took that out shooting in a -20 windchill with no problems.  And I wasn’t out there long enough this time for reduced battery life to be a problem.

Some of you may have noticed by now that it’s impossible to get that little depth-of-field at f/8… and you would be right.  On the spot, I did a little bit of DOF bracketing between f/2.8 and f/8 so that I could later select the one that appealed to me most.  But even the ones shot wide-open had the building far too in-focus; so after picking out the best composition, I got to work on it in post to fix that background.  I used the Depth of Field filter in TiffenDFX for the gradient blur, adjusting it so that the gradient started at the bottom of the frame and ended at the bottom of the building, making a perspective-correct blurring of the rest of the background (rather than the arguably lazier tilt-shift style).  I tried to mask out the tree directly in TiffenDFX, but its masking controls are kind of clunky, and they don’t handle soft edges very well.  So I made a version with the gradient blur and one without, taking them both into Photoshop, layering them, and then painting in the image mask by hand.

The result is pretty smooth and fairly realistic, and more importantly, closely matches my original vision for the photo.

week 29 1/3: art day

We had planned the day after Thanksgiving to practice our respective artsy hobbies, ranging from painting to writing to photography (or in my dad’s case, torturing us with bad music).  First, we walked to a local restaurant for brunch, and then to a nearby art supply store to pick up some necessary items.

Canon 40D: 17mm @ f/2.8, 1/80th, ISO 800

And of course I brought the camera with me, snapping several good pics of my family perusing the shelves, but this one of my sister agonizing over the watercolor pencils was the best.  I looked through their matte and frame section myself, having recently developed an interest in putting some of my own images on the wall, and picked out a nice matte for something my mom was doing.  I also grabbed a small Moleskine to slip into my camera bag for note-taking, and then it was back to the apartment to get started.

Canon 40D: 17mm @ f/2.8, 1/30th, ISO 400

My mom and sister set up a bright lamp on the dining room table, drawing out stuff they would later paint in.  I took the opportunity of stationary subjects to try the lightstand and umbrella again, this time with some moderate success.  I positioned it camera-right to fill in the shadows cast by that single lamp, experimenting with a variety of framings and flash outputs.  The final result is a little more subtle than I would’ve liked, and in retrospect, a simple reflector would’ve been easier and more effective.  I really need to get one.

Much later, we finally packed up and went back to our hotel downtown, where it was my turn to do something I had been anticipating for awhile.  Our room was on the top floor of a moderately tall building in downtown Minneapolis, and we had a reasonably good view of few taller buildings and the city in general out of our window.  As everybody else was getting ready for bed, I slapped my camera on the tripod, and made several long exposures of some of the more interesting intersections and buildings.  Shooting through a window at night causes a lot of problems with reflections, even with the lights in the room turned off.  I ended up wrapping a black trash bag around my silver tripod legs to keep them from being visible on the glass.  Another situation where a certain piece of equipment would’ve been really helpful (*cough* circular polarizer), but not totally necessary.

Canon 40D: 88mm @ f/9, 1/125th, ISO 200

When we got up the next morning, I took several more shots in the early light before we checked out.  I knew beforehand I’d be turning these into fake tilt-shift images, and I shot them with that in mind, using a small aperture to get maximum depth of field and composing them accordingly.  Later I used TiffenDFX’s Depth of Field filter to apply the tilt-shift effect, layering two of them and adjusting the coverage and blur amount until I got something that looked reasonably good.  Using that particular blur filter ensures that you don’t end up with a hard transition between in-focus and out-of-focus areas, which I find painful to look at and pretty unrealistic.

Stay tuned for the last post of the series: our trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art…