GeoTagging

So I've been playing with my Camera a little, trying to get used to it, before I deploy to the ice. I've come across what seems to be a relatively new thing to do with all the pictures you take. It's called geoTagging. There are lots of other discussions out there on what to use, how to do it, etc. Just google it up. I found one GPS tracker that actually will sit in the hot shoe of your camera and record your coordinates when you take each photograph, I thought that was neat, but it was yet another device to buy. I already have a few GPS units. One is old and antiquated, and the other is my Garmin edge 305... soon to be antiquated, I fear, with Garmin's release of the new spiffy edge 705. Darn technology, always getting better, LOL.

Anyhow, from what I've read the work flow for geoTagging seems to go like this... Take a hike, turn on a GPS device to track and record your positions. Take some photos. When you get home, download the photos, collect the data from the GPS device. Then use the software package of your choice to sync up the photos with your GPS data. What it does is look at the time stamp on the photo, and then finds the position where you where at, at that time. Then it adds the latitude and longitude to the EXIF data on the photo. There you have it... geoTagged photos. I have been using an app called PhotoMapper by COPIKS. It can only import jpeg images (I'd love something to tag RAW images), but it can use various formats of GPS data, including .gpx, .hst, and .tcx, as well as a few others. The .tcx is useful to me since I can export that right out of Garmin's Training center, the software that comes with the edge. Just a word of caution though, I've found out so far, if you save a RAW file from Picasa2 to jpeg, and then try to open the jpg up in PhotoMapper, it crashes... not sure why, so for now, I've been using the Canon Utilities to convert from RAW to jpeg. Anyone want to buy me photoshop CS3? :) pretty please?

As far as the results? Well, you can view them in google earth, and other various photo collection sites out on the web. I'm curious to see how well all this web app stuff handles data sourced from the antarctic. We'll find out soon enough I guess. I've uploaded some of the tagged pics to my picasa account if you want to see how it works. I think my favorite pic is of a wind blown tree:
I'm still not all that happy with most of my pictures mostly due to shadows and stuff. I think that its mostly because of the time of day and year though. The sun is low in the sky, and its mid-late afternoon, so the shadows are getting long. Oh well. Only way to get better at composition is to take more photos....