The new Hampshire Adobe User’s group is a great group of folks that meets the second Tuesday of the month at UNH. They just switched to a new blog, and are getting the word out. Make sure to check it out at http://nhadobeusergroup.blogspot.com/.
Meeting topics vary, and are not always Adobe Related. Meetings are open to the public, and they’re always interested in meeting new people.
Recently I gave a talk to the New Hampshire Adobe User’s Group which meets the second Tuesday of every month at 1:30 here at the University of New Hampshire. It’s open to anyone who wants to come. If you have any interest in any of the topics listed for upcoming talks, you should stop in some time. It’s a good group of people that get together to cover Adobe and non adobe related topics, from using Google tools, to Coldfusion for designers, to my talk on photography.
During my presentation I spoke from the experience of an amature photographer. One that has taken a few classes, and done a lot of reading online, and lots of playing in the field. I shared little tidbits I pulled from my travels on the web, that some people might have never seen, and added my own experiences to the mix. This post acts as a warm up converting a presentation with visual aids to an online format. So what I’m saying is, stay tuned! I’ll cover the basic terminology, and basic rules of photography so we can then begin to bend and break them.
I’m also working on a specific category for these posts so that they can all be retrieved together while cutting out my other various rantings, which I’ll add to this post as well. Until then, happy surfing
In the last couple of weeks I got back to trying something out that I’ve been trying to piece together since 2000/2001. I always thought it might be interesting to track GPS data with images taken from a webcam pointing out the windshield when on a road trip. If you’re wondering why I might think something like this is cool, you should probably read my newly crafted About page to get an idea. This article, is by no means an in-depth how to. There are many sources out there that will guide you step by step with specific hardware software solutions. This article is a broader discussion of my findings and recommendations based on my findings.
Since I take a lot photos when we’re on vacation, I almost always have a laptop with me to back up my shots. Because of this, I’ve settled for the clunkier but much more cost effective Street Atlas 2008 with
Earthmate Lt-120 GPS receiver option for in-car navigation, if needed. The added bonus is that you can do all sorts of cool stuff with it. Including just turn it on and let it track where you are, which is the first step in geotagging. When your done for the day, you can save the GPS log from your day’s journey. Street Atlas saves the log file as a special Delorme .gpl format. There are conversion tools out there that can read that and convert it, sometimes, but Delorme is cool like that, they know you want your data, it’s yours. If you click on the Draw tab, where you would normally design a set of waypoints for a trip, you can import the gpl file as a layer in either track, or waypoint data, to name 2 of the 3 important types. From here you can save it right back out as a .gpx file, or GPS XML file as they are known.
The GPX file is gold, this is what you want for output from what ever you plan to collect your gps data with. It’s an open and specific XML format, which means you can even open the file in something as simple as notepad and view the data. It also means that most of the free software for combining GPS and EXIF data can read it.
Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture: f/6.3
Focal Length: 300 mm
Latitude: N 43° 2′ 24.54″
Longitude: W 70° 42′ 55.321″
Altitude: 18
GPS Time (atomic clock): 7/1, 36/1, 14/1
Geodetic Survey Datum Used: WGS-84
GPS Date: 2008:01:12
Compression: JPEG
City: 5 km NE of Rye
Province/State: New Hampshire
Country/Primary Location Name: United States
Exif data, is metadata stored inherently in some formats of photos. Jp(e)g files and camera raw (raw, nef, etc). You’re probably familiar with it, just not sure what it was called. Most commonly seen on flickr, is the “This photo taken with an ________ camera.” This is just one of the things you can enter in exif data. Other common data that gets stored when you take a photo include iso, f-stop (aperture) and shutter speed to name a few. It doesn’t have to stop there.
A more and more common phenomenon is the inclusion of GPS data in the exif data, which can answer the question “where did you take that photo?” This data typically includes Latitude, Longitude and Altitude. According to the software, you can also automatically include data like Town, State, etc. The best software to do this I found it available for free (donation recommended) For Mac OSX Tiger and Leopard.
The software, GPSPhotoLinker is available at http://oregonstate.edu/~earlyj/gpsphotolinker/. This software is sweet. You can load multiple gpx files and load directories of photos, or individual files. By clicking on the batch tab, you can run a batch write to the photos and be done with it. The sweetest part is that file formats included nef files, Nikon’s raw format. This meant that I didn’t need to convert all my raw files to jpg and then process, as I only keep the nef files on my server and upload the jpgs to flickr then delete them.
Other neat features include the ability to enter in ‘as the crow flies’ locations. Take the photo at left for instance. . . If you click on the image, it will take you directly to the exif info page at flickr about this photo. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the GPS data. It displays latitude, longitude, altitude, atomic time and that the photo was taken 5km North East of the town center of Rye, New Hampshire. Pretty cool.
This photo was shot with my Nikon D40. I also shot other photos, like the ones on the right, on a timed sequence using a great little web camera from Logitech. The QuickCam Pro for Notebooks is a 2 megapixel (1600×1200) web camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and built in auto focus. I used Webcam Surveyor
to capture photos from the web camera every 3 minutes and save it to the hard drive of my laptop. The effect would be similar to timelapse, but in stead, by saving each photo separate instead of into a movie file, I could pick and choose the photos I wanted to keep, and still create a time lapse movie later if I wanted to. The software is only $30, and can do all sorts of great stuff including time lapse photo/movies, motion detection and recording (with the ability to mask) and other great stuff. It’s worth checking into. You can try it for 30 days to make sure it will work for your needs, I’m sure it will.
Make sure your camera’s time matches your local time based on UTC time. HA WHAT? It’s simple. The date/time in the gps stuff will be based on UTC time and adjusted to your area. Look at your gps and see what time it says, and set the clock on your camera to match. The matching of gps location and photo is done with date/time photo was taken and the time stamp in the gps log.
I shoot in raw, probably don’t need to, but I do. I like knowing I have the most flexibility with my photos I can when I get them home. IT gives me warm fuzzies inside. So it was important for me to have software that could work with the raw files. Again, this is why GPSPhotoLinker is so great. However, I did find two things that I had to work around by adjusting my work flow. Really not a big deal now that I know. This is also why I went on several test runs prior to the big trip where I wanted the system to be flawless. I use Adobe Bridge from the Creative Suite to manage my photos. I use it to sort, tag and rate my photos. The first time I tried compiling the results, I did my normal sorting out, adding additional metadata to make it easier to find a photo later, rated the ones I wanted to post to flickr with the stars and did a little color correction, cropping and sharpening, then ran Photlinker to add in the GPS data. Here’s where I hit one small snag. Somehow, the link to the xmp file (xml file containing edits to the nef file) was lost. Metadata stayed, but exposure correction, cropping, and ratings in bridge were lost. I had to go back and do it again.
The other slight snag I hit was that the photos recorded from webcamsurveyor did not have exif data that could be read correctly. I had to use a second piece of software called GPicSync to tag those photos. It was able to read the file created date to enter the gps data into the exif data. I suspect though, that this is more from the way photos from a webcam are saved then GPSPhotolinker.
I could go into so much detail on this process that you would never read the whole thing, maybe you didn’t. . . Anyone still there? If so, congratulations! There are much better ways to do this, including gps data loggers that clip to your pack if you’re straying from your car, or devices that clip into your hotshoe and write the gps data when the photo is taken. But these can cost from $50 to $400 respectively. I’d be interested in finding out if any of you have tried this out, and what you found worked for you.
I’ve been focusing more on photography again and neglecting my blog. I’ve been chasing after wildlife, and trying to get my gigs of photos at home sorted, tagged and uploaded to flickr. When I first started, I didn’t have a good plan for keeping my photos sorted, so now I’m paying for it. Thanks to Adobe Bridge CS3, I’m making short work of it.
I’ve also been experimenting with geotagging, or the correlating of GPS data with the exif data of photos. I think I have a semi working method involving a laptop in the car running Delorme Street Atlas 2008 and some great software available on both Mac and PC. There are much better ways to do it, but this method used existing hardware/software to my inventory to proof the concept without paying out any monies.I’ll elude to writing something about it at a later date, but don’t wait holding your breath, o.k.?
Finally, I’m angrily waiting for the Amazon Associates program to pay me for the referral fees from you folks shopping through my store. For 4 straight months now I have far exceeded the minimum amount for payment, and received no payment to date. I’ve been fed “We’re looking into it” for 2-3 weeks now and latest inquiries have gone unanswered. I’m sure an in depth write up will occur soon as well.
As far as the Dude you’re getting a Dell story, things turned out ok in the end. Anonymous got the machine, albeit by driving from Concord to Portsmouth to pick it up at the DHL location the Saturday before Christmas. Where he was in line with other folks picking up their Dells. A long and frustrating tale goes along with that, but it’s a new year. He also got a small refund for the annoyance.
So as I eluded, I’ve been taking photos, so here are some of the latest.
I’ve had it! Every time I turn on my computer, there are more updates for Adobe CS3. I mean, this is a bit much. Please, if anyone out there works for Adobe, GIVE IT A BREAK!
I’d bitch more, but I’m told by the stupid adobe updater I have to close Firefox now.
I’d make a horrible Dad. I know it. Know why? Got any clues? Well, in 2006 on 10-25 at 9:57 P.M. I posted my first article here on Brickblog. Why, I remember when this blog was still in diapers, I was excited to get 1 visit after posting oh so many articles. To date, I’m up to 4,694 visits since I installed Google Analytics (November 9, 2006) to track such things. Truly amazing. What’s even scarrier is when I analyze what kinds of articles bring people to my site, I see when you search for d40 vs d70 my site comes up #1 in google.
So lets think back to what brought this blog to life. . .
Oh thats right, those damn raccoons. They’re still around, in fact I had great fun, ehr, I mean I was left no other option, then to shoot one a couple weeks ago with my paintball gun while I had the electric fence repurposed on the garden for the summer.
But of course, I wouldn’t be here with such an audience if it wasn’t for my peeps. Those folks that both read my insane ramblings, and those that link to my blog. So since I can’t thank every single one of you by name, I’ll be certain to report out what WordPress tells me are the good folks linking to my site.
Thanks!
I’ve recently had need to consume and display an ‘rss’ Atom Feed from a blog I’ve set up using Blogger. Blogger more specifically addresses Intellectual Property for your posts, which was mandatory for this use. I need to display the article feed on various sites, all using Coldfusion as the application server. I also have need to pull only specific entries marked with a certain category for the post.
When I started looking at the XML created for the atom feed it was much more complex then RSS, and a bit problematic to process. When I looked for someone who had tackled this in the past, most if not all, of the current working code was try and buy. Bah, no good. So I tackled it myself, and as the communities reward, here is the code. FREE, as in FREE, YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY, TAKE IT USE IT. The only condition is that I do not guaranty the code, I most likely will not support the code, and it’s commented well enough that you should be able to use it.
That’s not to say I won’t answer questions posted as comments, I will also take comments on how to make the code better, but I may not release updates.
So what’s it do? It expects a full Atom Feed, it reads it into a variable, it finds the entries in the XML, and pulls the ones marked with a specific category that you can set.
There should be nothing remaining hard coded, the user should be able to set what they need at the top. It’s displayed with simple HTML markup.
Download the cfm file. Change the extension to cfm and enjoy.
While on vacation, I finally had a chance to do a little project I had been planning for a while. A few months ago I got the UCS Lego Batmobile (Set 7784) for about a third of msrp. I had also been playing with Nikon Camera Control for a little while and had been trying to think of a cool time-lapse project. I decided to bring the set with me in the event of a day on vacation that we decided to just take it easy, and sure enough one of those came along. The result is below, though it looks like google video made the images a bit crummy.
For anyone that hasn’t done this type of thing before, it’s pretty simple, at least at this amateur hour level of quality. You’ll need some way of controlling the camera. This could be done manually, or in my case I used Nikon Camera Control Pro Software for Windows and Mac
You’ll also need a tripod. I set mine up so it looked down at the table roughly at a 45 degree angle. This gave me a trapezoidal view of my building area. I marked my boundaries with masking tape, which mostly matched the color of the table. This way I knew what would be captured and what would not. Important for keeping the bottle of beer off screen as you work. ;-) Finally, when the capture process was complete, I batch resized my images (while preserving the originals) with Adobe Fireworks to a size more appropriate for DV video size (720×480) then imported the files to Adobe Premiere as an ordered sequence. Finally export your movie and thats it!
If you don’t have Premiere, you could use either Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie depending on your platform. Sorry Linux Folks, don’t know what you have available, but I bet there’s lots of it.
The process was smooth, and a great proof of concept of doing time lapse. I did find however it is a power consuming process. Over the 2-3 hour process of shooting a frame every 2 minutes I drained a mostly filled battery. Which means, to do a full day project you would need the AC adapter for your camera.
As for the build, it was fun! The Batmobile was very cool. A lot of neat details, the one thing I was upset about was the lack of steering. The front wheels drive the gears that simulate an engine, while the steering wheel raises and lowers the front armor over the turbine intakes. There were also a lot of great parts in the set. Lots of roof pieces and wedges that could be used in castles or other vehicles. For now it’s still one of the few assembled sets in my house. We’ll see how long it stays together. To have lasted this long is a feat for sure.
After getting a little bit of a run around today, myself and another coworker got to the real issue we’ve been having with Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 Master collection.
According to Adobe tech support, the media is hosed.
It seems with a volume license key, you are prompted to activate. Upon attempting to activate, “This key has been activated too many times” is your reward message.
What makes this even better? As purchasers of VLK, we should not even need to activate the software. The key, is supposed to be recognized as such and no phone home should be required. In our case, at least on the PC side of things, this is not the case. On my Macbook Pro, I’ve already started editing some photos with no problem.
Right now, tech support has no idea when this will be fixed. “hopefully by the end of next week” is the target date and they have no idea how the fix may be done. Maybe a patch, maybe a reissue of the media. We’ll wait and see.
