AlienShots, A Photographer’s Blog

GeoTagging

Being able to Geotag ( latitude, longitude and altitude) your photos is an extremely cool feature. Today you need an external GPS system attached to your camera, but soon we will see that feature built in with most cameras. Never the less external GPS systems are small devices that do not add weight or clumsiness to your camera and some of them operate on a single AAA battery while others use your camera’s battery. In either cases the battery is used only when a photo is taken so the batteries do last for about 800 photos or more on a single charge according to manufactures that is. Check out PhotoFinder , Jelbert GeoTagger, or for Sony Cameras GPS UNIT f/DSC

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Whenever you transfer photos from your camera to your computer, the GPS data is transfered too through EXIF data. It works by syncing the time on your camera with the GPS devices internal time, so each photo is tagged by the time of the shot and its exact geographical location. You can then combine it with Google maps or other maps form the manufactures and have an exact location of where your photo was taken in an error no larger then 10 meters. What a cool feature for marking urban landmarks and places of interest. check out Panorado , Trip Tracker is very nice too. There are many tools for uploading your Geotagged photos, a cool one is PictureSync because its easy to use and works with many photosharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Shutterfly and a bunch of others. If you are adding Geodata manually you can do that through Picasa by visually locating a point on Google Earth

You can go to Google Maps for example, and search for an interesting landmark near you. Its like when you travel abroad and when you arrive at a town go and look at the local postcards. Investigating local postcards is a great way to find the best shooting locations without wasting precious time, then simply try to improve on those shots you saw in the postcards, maybe you can look at those places of interest from different angles, different time of day, or simply try to capture some details. I do that all the time.
Yes, Geo tagging is useful for wildlife photography too, but bare in mind that animals migrate and move over huge distances, water holes dry out and vegetation changes but I would love to try one on my next shootout. If I get one soon I will post more details.

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