Wherever you go, there you are - precisely

"Wherever you go, there you are."  Sage wisdom that I was all ready to credit to Yogi Berra (always a fairly safe thing to do when it comes to this sort of rubric) but it turns out to be sort of ancient, actually.  Putative credit for this bit of intellectual flotsam goes back centuries!

Never mind,  I have another question this morning. OK, sure, it's a truism and I'll not argue.  There your are.  But... how do you know?  Got any data? (Pundits without data are as endangered as polar bears these days.)

Well, here's how you know. You buy this amazing little device from the folks at di-GPS and attach it to your Nikon camera via the supplied cable.  Turn it on and within minutes it will find itself and start piping GPS data to each and every picture you take. Open that picture in Preview on your Mac and you can pop right over to Google Maps and see exactly where you were.  There you are, with data to prove it.

Knowing where your photo was taken is incredibly useful and valuable. You can see one use by going over to my web site, JimRichardsonPhotography.com, where I have a map of geotagged photos from my latest cruise of the British and Irish Isles. But I'll write further about that later.  Right now just be aware that this is about the easiest way to get that data into your pictures that I have found.  There are other solutions but they all have some limitations.  For instance, by various means you can carry around a GPS device that will track your location during your daily wanderings, then marry its location data with the time you took your picture later when you download.  It adds another step to the process and is fraught with ways to screw things up, in my book.

And there are other on-camera GPS units, but they have serious shortcomings, too.  The trick is that the GPS unit needs to be up-and-running, to know where it is, when you turn on the camera. Most GPS units power down when your camera meter turns itself off.  Then you are going to be somewhere when you see a picture to take and you are not going to want to wait five minutes while your on-camera GPS looks around for satellites. Really, it can take that long.   One answer to that is to set your Nikon to the GPS option which, essentially, tells your meter NOT to turn itself off.  That's a real battery drainer.

The di-GPS has another answer.  The camera meter can turn off but the di-GPS unit stays on, constantly updating its location like any well behaved GPS unit.  Then when you turn on your camera or simply press the shutter release halfway to wake it up the GPS link is reestablished in less than a second. It does drain batter power some and you'll find you'll need an extra battery at hand on a long day.  But it is a very, very good compromise and I find it quite workable.  

If you are a Canon user you'll have noticed that I sort of jumped right over that little issue up at the beginning.  That's because the Canon cameras don't have the necessary slot to plug the GPS unit into.  (Sorry, I didn't do it.)  There is a work-around but you won't like it.  You buy the appropriate Canon WFT Wireless Transmitter for your camera and then you will have the necessary connection.  This will only cost you upwards of $750 (I said you wouldn't like it.)  You might just want to buy a Nikon D5000 (with provided kit lens) for the same money and be done with it, but I doubt that's what you'll want to do. ( If I were you I'd be calling up Chuck Westfall and asking him when Canon is going to get their act together. They do most everything else right.) 

Of course you don't have to do the GPS unit at all.  You can just go into Flickr or some other geotagging program and manually locate your photos on a satellite photo.  But telling your photos where they were taken is not quite the same as having your photos tell you where they were taken.  Not as accurate, either.  (And really, will you remember where you were five years from now when some stock agency asks where this photo was taken?)

One last point.  There's another, very simple, way to get geotagged photos:  just shoot them on you iPhone. Any picture you take on a second generation, GPS equipped iPhone is automatically geotagged.  Nice. 

So, there you are.  Precisely.

Comments

[Janne]

Or, you can use a stand-alone GPS unit. Have it record a trace of where you are. When you get home and download the iamges, you use a small app (there's several free and open ones available) that checks the timestamp on each picture, looks up where the GPS unit was at that time, then adds the coordinates to the image exif data.

Not quite as seamless as the gps unit you post, but almost. And, the standalone GPS unit works as a navigator too, something your unit does not.

[Jim Richardson]

Janne, you are absolutely right and I think I might do just that if I didn't think I would find some way to screw it up! (I'm pretty good at screwing things up.) Particularly when I go off to some other time zone with two or three cameras and don't remember to set their clocks precisely. (You can sync them to your Mac using Nikon Control but I rarely actually to that.) Then I could (if I were being particularly perverse) download all those pictures to one folder and THEN discover that one of the cameras was off by a couple of minutes (which is a LOT when I'm shooting aerial photographs from a plane.) Then I would be in the situation of trying to sort out those pictures and adjust the times for just that one camera.

Well, you can see pretty quickly why I really don't trust myself to use the external GPS unit. (And how much I admire photographers who can.)

On the other hand, Janne, I think you also realize that there is a another real benefit to what you suggest: you don't have to have yet another device hooked up to your camera. No cables (that can catch on things) running around, no little unit sitting in the hot shoe just when you want to do fill flash, and etc.

Thanks for the advice. Let me know how it works for you in practice. How long can your GPS unit record you track. A few days? A month?

Kind of fun stuff, isn't it.

[Janne]

Ah, for aerial photo I'd go with your unit, no doubt about it. Separate synching is fine when being off by thirty seconds or so is no big deal.

The GPS I use (a Gecko 301) is an old, primitive one, but even it can record a full day's worth of traces if it's set to a suitably low sampling rate, like one point every ten seconds or so.

But I've only done this to see if it works to be honest. It does work, and pretty well, but - to tell the truth - I just didn't find enough benefit of having my pictures geotagged to keep it up. I do mostly urban photography on foot (and strictly as a bumbling hobbyist of course) and the location is normally pretty clear from the picture itself or my own memory of where I was.

[Alastair]

I wonder if you've have you ever had any trouble with signal reliability when using the di-GPS unit inside a helicopter or light aircraft? Does rapid aircraft movement or the airframe interfere with the satellite signal reception?

I potentially have some aerial shooting coming up to monitor ecological features on the ground, so would require accurate and reliable location data. Do you think the di-GPS would suit this?

[peter]

i want to know the signal reliability inside a helicopter too??
i normally flying at 1500 ft 100kts-150kts
thanks

[truck rental]

It's wonderful! Today GPS is only being use in navigation systems or military isuues, and no one really thinks in big how to expand the use for other products. Photography is a good idea, what else could it be? There must be countless ideas and endless uses, I hope I'll come across some soon!

[Ben]

I think you also realize that there is a another real benefit to what you suggest: you don't have to have yet another device hooked up to your camera. No cables (that can catch on things) running around, no little unit sitting in the hot shoe just when you want to do fill flash, and etc. http://www.hotfilemediafire.com

[Moving Company]

first time I used GPs when I was moved to my new home as I have no idea about the city. GPS is a satellite-based navigation system made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit. It provides time information in all weather and at all times and anywhere on or near the Earth. there is no doubt that GPS is quite useful invention.

[comments system]

This is really cool gadget, very smart and original idea, I wonder what other uses for GPS will be in the future. Thanks for the interesting post.

[Laura, Adult Tricycles]

I found the GPS-camera combo technology kinda creepy. It enables the public to easily find out where a posted picture was taken. For example, a stalker could simply right click the photo you tweeted of your kids playing at home, then click an option similar to ‘view image data’, and in an instant they will see the longitude and latitude measures of your home.

[packaging machine]

very cool product. these days technology makung life very easy indeed. thanks for the review.

[Terri]

Interesting GPS, looks like the right one for the job.

Terri

[מסעות]

Various indicates you can have around a GPS system that will trail your area during your day-to-day wanderings, then wed its area information with time you took your image later when you obtain.