The world as frankps sees it!
Photos
I have taken quite a few pictures through the years. Most of them end up on my Flickr account, and some in tourist guides and magazines around the world.
Struggling with Lightroom
0I have been playing a bit with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and I must say that it is a beautiful workflow tool for photos. All my photos are taken in NEF, Nikon’s own RAW format.
The originale photo is not bad:
But after two-three minutes in Lightroom, this is what I got:
And what have I done? Simply added some more light and adjusted the colors.
Some enjoyable moments in Mindszent
02 years ago
Days in Heaven …
It is Easter and the whole family has been down at the summer house in Mindszent. It has more or less become a tradition that the holidays are spent down here. And why not? It is after all Hungary at the greenest, and during the last couple of summers the temperature has often been to high.
The spring came with sun and nice temperatures just days before I arrived. So next to working remotely, there has been some nice walks, running on the dykes, sunbading and lots of time spent with family.
26-27 degrees for several days in a row early April. It is hard to resist! Within days the whole garden was blooming, and I have taken tons of pictures that I have uploaded to Flickr.
I have my excuse, as I have been trying learn how to use my Nikon D60 SLR. I even brought with me the manuals! It has not been easy, and I have shot many dark pictures, but also been lucky and gotten some beautiful pictures from sunsets.
These two photos were taken down by the beach in Mindszent. It was not the perfect spot for sunset photos.
One afternoon was spent in Szeged, with a quick walk down the main street, a visit to Kis Virág and two hours out at Szeged Plaza, a shopping mal with cinema, bowling and a few restaurants.
In between working, there was always time to play with Julia. She was crying a lot the two first days, and we guess that it was cause of the big change in temperature and that she needed time to adjust. On the third day she woke with a smile and have been playing with all of us through the days. I enjoyed catching the moments both on photos and video.
Ain’t she cool with her first pair of sunglasses?
Cause of the nice, warm spring weather Espen and Aleksandra decided to buy Julia her first set of summer clothes. Of course that had to be put down in pictures:
It is truely my hometown. It is where I feel home and can relax. And luckily I have a few more days down here. Tomorrow I will get together with my friends. The pub next door is having a retro party. And I wonder where to buy my clothes …
I have to end this blog entry as I promised myself some cake today. A new placed have opened selling cakes and ice cream. Yummy …
I whish you and yours a peaceful and enjoyable Easter. Several photos have been made available on my Flickr account.
Lightroom and geo data (GPS)
1I recently bought a copy of Lightroom 2.0 and have it installed on my Windows 7 x64 installation. I was quite surprised that Lightroom didn’t have any features for geo data. I found that I couldn’t merge geo data from my Sony GPS-CS1 GPS unit. But it was not more then one search on Google with the words “lightroom gps” and I was on the track of getting my problem solved. On LightroonNews I found the article GPS metadata in Lightroom and Google Maps, and it turns out that basically, if you have GPS metadata embedded in an image file, Lightroom will let you link directly to Google Maps and locate exactly where that photograph had been taken. Lightroom does not allow direct input or in-line editing of GPS data, in fact the GPS fields only appear in the metadata panel when you’ve selected an image that has GPS data already embedded.
So the big question is how do I get the metadata merged in to the pictures on my Nikon D60? On my Mac, I use HoudahGeo to get the geo data in with the rest of the EXIF metadata stored within the pictures. I found that the photo entusiast Jeffrey Friedl has made a Geoencoding plugin for Lightroom 2.0. It is distributed as “donationware”. That basically means that it is provided as free. So also in this case for the first six weeks, after which it becomes limited to geoencoding 10 photos at a time until registered. Registration is only 1 cent. So I guess I will end up paying the normal 15-20 dollars, as I do for most of the shareware I buy. But first, I would like to try it!
Installation is fairly easy. Just install the plugin in to the following directory: \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Plugins\
Geotagging in a whole new way!
03 years ago
Geotagging with the innovative Flickr bike! Fun, fun, fun …
Geotagging Photos: A Review of Sony GPS-CS1 and HoudahGeo
8
I have since spring this year been working with trend analyzes on where the Internet is going. There are many great Web 2.0 applications out there, and some of them combines great hardware, desktop and web applications in ways that 2-3 years ago were unthinkable.
On Friday I bought a Sony GPS-CS1 at FOTOVIDEO. So why this device? GPS-CS1 officially only comes with support for Windows, but being a USB device that mounts on your desktop like a USB Pen Drive, should make it close to platform independent! No advanced Bluetooth driver is needed. I’m keeping my private photos on my MacBook Pro, so for me MacOS X support was a need. Having said that you might get problems with mounting the device on older versions of MacOS X, but Apple have confirmed that the latest Mac OS X Leopard release, from 10.5.3, has support for the device. But I don’t want to only use it to geotag my photos, I also want to use the device to track my bike trips – http://www.mapmyride.com/.
Sony also only list support for various Sony cameraes, but the device syncs well with non-Sony cameras as GPS location data and jpeg metadata (EXIF 2.1) are standards. I used an old Konica Minolta camera for my first tests, and will later test it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35 camera. The unit weights 55 g and can store your geographic position four times a minute, which makes about 15 days worth of trackpoints on the 31 MB of internal memory. Battery life should be about 10 hours on AA batteries. GPS-CS1 make it a great deal for those of us who only want a photo tagger, don’t need a full-size GPS unit, and don’t want to buy a GPS camera.
The GPS-CS1 device lets you attach it to a backback or belt loop, so that you carry around while you shoot. It records your GPS location and this information can later be synchronized with your digital images to provide a map of where your photos were taken, by using date and time information stored in the image headers. For this reason it’s important to make sure the clock on the digital camera is correctly set. No setting is needed on the GPS device because the time is also transmitted on the satellite signal.
I use Flickr for photo sharing. There’s a setting there that you have to manually change before you upload EXIF-geotagged photos; once you do this, it’ll map all newly-uploaded photos automagically! I have long wanted to arrange my pictures geographically on Flickr. This can of course be done manually, but that is taking a lot of time. With a GPS you can import the logged data in to Flickr, but first you must enable “Import EXIF location data” in your account settings (see screenshot above).
I chose HoudahGeo as my preferred application for merging photos with geo dato. The application has a lot of potential, and I find it to be the best one available on the Mac platform. And the price? Yes, great software rarely comes for free. The application costs 25 euros, and is worth every cent! I have a few words about their support service as well. I fired of a question to their published e-mail address last Sunday morning, and got it answered a few moments later. Unexpected and very pleasant! I have a few suggestions for improvements of the application that I have included in this blog entry.
The first button lets users import photos directly from iPhoto. The window that appears should be familiar for all users used to using the iLife applications. A great feature is that drag and drop from iPhoto is supported too. Even the name and comments fields from iPhoto are imported too! Photos can also be imported by clicking on the second button in toolbar.
HoudahGeo synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from several GPS devices (Garmin, Magellan and Wintec) over Bluetooth, but it can also read the data from files from devices mounted with USB (as the GPS-CS1 device). The Sony device stores the geo data in .log files, so it’s just to choose the correct file:
Adding the geo data to the photos are done in a matter of one or two seconds, and you are then ready to go the three last buttons in the toolbar. The first button writes the saves the geo data to the pictures, the second exports the EXIF data and the pictures to Google Earth or Google Maps, and the third one uploads the photos with geo data to Flickr.
HoudahGeo supports upload of selected photos to Flickr. You can also set it to only upload photos that have been geocoded. Just as the official Flickr Uploadr, you can define the maximum image size (resolution) for the photos when uploaded in Flickr. The last option “Include machine tags” shows the geo data as metadata in Flickr.
Before it starts uploading the photos to Flickr, you are asked to authorize HoudahGeo as a trusted Flickr application (the app can later be deleted in your Flickr settings.
I would like to see a better integration with Flickr. I truely miss not being able to add the photos that I am about to upload to an existing set or create a new one. It would also be great to add other tags than machine tags.
PS! You don’t need to purchase a GPS device to enjoy the wonders of HoudahGeo, the application can also be used to manually add geocoding to photos by using Google Earth or Google Maps.
