Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

After a long fight that started when I handled the Nikon D90 Digital SLR camera at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October I finally lost my battle against the upgrade bug and bought one to replace my 2 year old Nikon D80. I had been on the fence about the upgrade being worth it. I knew the D90 would be a great camera, but my D80 doesn’t yet feel like yesterday’s technology and I wasn’t convinced the newer body given my expectedly light use of big bang features like video would pay off for me.

After a full day [a mostly non-shooting day] with the camera I can say that the handling and setup feels very familiar. Out of the box I could just pick it up and shoot. At the same time it does leave the impression that what I am shooting with is indeed an upgraded camera and not just a slightly different camera. The real test will come in the next few weeks through holidays and weekend shoots but I’m in not regretting the purchase. Admittedly, some of what I notice is just new car smell [or new camera feel] — like having new rubber under my hand instead of the smoothed and slightly warn grip on the older body — but Nikon has made some real positive [if small] changes between generations and I think I’ll continue to be happy with the decision made..

There are a few changes or features I found that might not be apparent when looking at specs alone yet stood out to me as I was reading the manual and setting things to my liking. The list may only be useful to those considering the same jump that I made, but I’d imagine there are a few of you out there.

• The newer LCD is fabulous, but as important then its size is that it the interaction seems zipper when reviewing and zooming. The hourglass on the initial pressing of the zoom button seems gone.
• The reworked menu categories will take some getting used to, but I was always the ‘set it and forget it’ type that didn’t mess around adjusting in camera picture settings. So for me, instead of learning the new placement I may be able to rely on the new “Recent Settings” tab that lusts the latest settings changed. Unfortunately, the menu item I use most — Format Memory Card — doesn’t appear to be considered a setting and thus isn’t tracked in this command history.
• The FUNC button on the front of the camera on the D80 was by default used to show the current ISO setting in the viewfinder and top LCD. This option isn’t available on the D90 button config. Its sort of moved to a new setting for showing the ISO in place of the shots remaining counter. I think this will be much more useful as I will always see the ISO [thought it silly not to before and lead to shooting with the last but wrong ISO often]. I’ve now got the FUNC button on the D90 set to change autofocus modes.
• The only accessory I couldn’t carry over from one to the other was the Nikon MC-DC1 corded remote, To accommodate the GPS input [and whatever other technical reason Nikon had] the port it used has changed. All my other D80 accessories from batteries to the RRS L-plate for mounting on a tripod head can be used with the new camera out a lot of hidden upgrade costs.

• The shutter motion on the D90 just sounds faster and a little more “pro”.

The only new D90 feature that’s got me bummed is that the corded remote port and GPS port are one and the same, something I hadn’t caught onto earlier. I don’t know that the Nikon GP-1 GPS purchase was in my future, but if I did grab one I would think it would be likely that I’d want to use both the GPS and the MC-DC2 remote cord while out shooting landscapes. But I guess its GPS with the IR remote or corded remote and sync GPS from another device later.

For those looking to make the upgrade purchase, I bought the Nikon D90 from BH Photo and I got free shipping with my NAPP membership. The camera is also available at Amazon and other fine retailers on the internets and near you. [a bit of link pimping to make the upgrade cost less painful]

Look for a followup post in a few weeks with some initial shooting impressions and samples after I’ve spent more time with the new toy.

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This past week brought the PDN PhotoPlus Expo to New York City once again. The show is a photo gear geek’s dream — where you can handle the swankiest new gear from the likes of Nikon, Canon, Adobe and Epson. And if gear isn’t your thing there are lots of demos, presentations and signings from famous photographers like Joe McNally, Moose Peterson, Vincent Versace, Jay Maisel and Scott Kelby.

While I’m not currently looking to buy any more photo gear I was checking out some bags [I’m such a bag whore], enjoyed playing with the new Lensbaby [much easier to use but still a pricey bit of kit] and wondered if the new, beefier gorillapod focus would be hefty enough to use with a ‘real’ camera.

Notably missing from the show: Apple, who in the past was showing off both hardware as well as their Aperture photo package [a stark contrast to Adobe which was riding on the LR2 and CS4 releases].

For more:

• PDN PhotoPlus 2008, my Flickr set

• Ryan Brenizer covers the show for Amazon

While some cameras and camera phones have the ability to geotag digital photos as they’re taken, most still don’t. However you can still geotag your photographs accurately and automatically with the use of an external GPS enabled device like a cell phone, navigation device, or a dedicated GPS logger. Any device that can record a “GPS track” that can be transfered to your computer can be used to tag photos. And photos taken with any digital camera can be tagged in this manner.

Here I’ll explain how I use GPSPhotoLinker on OS X to batch tag many photos from a day’s photo shoot with GPS tracks recorded on either a Sony GPS-CS1 or a Nokia N95 cell phone in order to create mapped photo galleries, like this one on Flickr.

Recording Tracks

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a device made specifically for logging GPS points for use in geotagging and attaches to your computer via USB. To start recording a track you just turn it on and to stop you turn it off. While its on it will record a log file containing points every 15seconds in a format called “NMEA sentences”.

The Nokia N95 is a higher end cell phone with built in GPS and the ability to install applications. The 3rd party location recording application I’ve found is called GPSed. Like the dedicated Sony device, while the application is running it records a log of points that can be transfered to your computer later via USB. Unfortunately, it writes logs are in a custom format that have to be uploaded to their web site and then exported into a variety of formats.

Other GPS devices like those from Garmin will work much the same way as described above — just follow the manual’s instructions on recording the tracks and downloading them to your computer.

There are many different geotagging applications on the market here are a few for OS X compared but I’ve settled on using GPSPhotoLinker because I don’t need some of the extra features like tagging via drag+drop or looking at images on maps. My desire is simply to sync the geo data with the photos and then get on with the rest of my workflow.

Converting tracks for use with GPSPhotoLinker

GPSPhotoLinker is great application, but its main limitation is that it only reads GPS tracks in 2 standard formats: GPX or TCX, which means that you may often have to convert the output of your GPS logger into something that it can read. For the tracks recorded with GPSed I can just download the exported tracks in this format, but for the Sony tracks in NMEA sentence format I’ll need another free application: GPSBabel and its companion GUI, GPSBabel+.

GPSBabel+ can be used to quickly convert from a large variety of different geo data formats into GPX files that can be loaded into GPSPhotoLinker.

Batch updating photo EXIF & IPTC metadata

Once the images are on the computer and the GPS tracks are in GPX format both can be loaded into GPSPhotoLinker where all images can be updated at once with its batch processing tools. The settings I use to update the photos can be see in the following screenshot.

What next?

After the individual photos are tagged I then work with them as I would any other photo. I import them into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom where I add text based tags, adjust colors and other image settings, ultimately choosing some for upload to Flickr or printing service. No additional intervention is needed to ‘use’ the results of the image tagging process — the metadata is visible in Lightroom where I can click it and see a google map location, and images uploaded to Flickr with this geodata are automatically placed on the map for me.

Quick Workflow Recap

1. Download photos and GPS tracks to my computer
2. Convert GPS tracks to .gpx with GPSBabel+
3. Load photos and .gpx file into GPSPhotoLinker and batch process them

1. Import photos into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, or similar aplication and get on with the image processing

Some additional notes and hints

• Be sure to keep GPS device and camera time settings in sync.
• I’ve found its best to pause your movement for a moment and check that the tracking device has a signal when shooting for most accurate results.

• GPSPhotoLinker updates IPTC fields with location data it receives from terraserver-usa.com, unfortunately I have found this information to be quite flaky, particularly when in an area that cannot be tied to a specific municipality [resulting in often occurrences of NJ locations written as being in NY]

Devices and Downloads mentioned in this article

• Sony CPS-CS1
• Nikon N95
• GPSBabel
• GPSed

• GPSPhotoLinker

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Comment on this photo at Flickr

I’m usually not one to enter photo contests and other events, but the Great Destinations NJ book project was interesting enough and the rights grab wasn’t too bad so I’ve uploaded some images. to the project.

Its sort of an Everywhere — or JPG — style book and DVD project showcasing the diversity of the Garden State.

There’s now 4 days left to contribute by uploading photos of New Jersey or voting on your favorites. So head on over. You can start by voting on my photo contributions.

Last Friday, Flickr held its second 24 hours of Flickr event where it asked photographers to take a photo sometime in the 24 hours that made up August 8th, 2008 and contribute to a giant pool of images from around the world.

Above is my humble contribution, taken late friday during a break on my regular bike route at Verona Park, in Verona NJ.

Those who read photography blogs may have already come across the dustup, but the discussion over [ab]use of the Flickr API and application developers not respecting copyright on content should be of interest to the web developers out there as well.

The discussion centers around the realization that last weekend Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale as cell phone wallpaper at MyxerTones.com — regardless of what copyright terms were designated on the photos — including All Rights Reserved and Creative Commons Non-Commercial flags. After complaints the store quickly shut down its Flickr integration, but its not the only usage of images that bothers some photographers.

As with all publishing on the web there’s a balance that both individual copyright holders need to think about and realization that if you publish it the bits /will/ be out there for people to take. There is a similar balance that those building web sites and other tools need to consider between ease of use and ability to protect the integrity of their systems and users. The interesting part of the current discussion is that there are so many ‘end users’ participating and those people not commonly thought of when considering and designing APIs.

More discussion at Thomas Hawk’s blog

Jaromir Jagr’s 2nd goal puts the Rangers up 3-0. Stanley Cup Playoffs, 2nd round, Game 4. May 1, 2008

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Due to rain last night some town had postponed their 4th of July fireworks. Millburn, NJ was one of them

They do. really do, and I never do a good enough job of pointing their efforts out. So here are a few new products to check out.

Davin Risk’s new print on demand photo book I have been where you are just arrived. 118 pages of great photos, some from his Flickr stream.

Samia Saleem and many other designers originally from the New Orleans area have gotten together to create the Degrees of Separation project and together have released a postcard book with their post Katrina responses with some proceeds going to local AIGA efforts.

Jemma and the team at Sans Nom have just posted images of a sweet new laser etched skateboard deck for Refill Magazine’s 7 Laserdeck Skateboard Show. Photos on the site are a must see.

Seems like a good time for a little update on my contributions to other sites around the internets…

I’m looking for your vote, if you think the shot is worthy, on this image of seedlings for the JPG Magazine ‘Breakthrough’ theme for their next issue.

And last weekend was the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, the weather was pretty good and the costumes better. A bunch of photos from the event are now up in a new Flickr Set

For digital photographers, particularly people shooting any sort of volume of RAW files you may find you need a better workflow for ‘development’ and organization of the photographs then simply storing the files on your file system and then opening a few at a time in Adobe Photoshop. Into that gap has come a few new applications including Apple’s Aperture. More recently, Adobe has finished work on its Lightroom application and moved it from a long public period to an official 1.0 release.

With that release two professional photographers and bloggers, Micah Walter and Michael Clark, have committed their time and expertise to putting both Aperture and Lightroom through the paces on a typical week or so of shooting and editing.

• Micah Walter’s shootout intro
• Michael Clark’s intro

Both photographers have started posting their day to day thoughts after working with he applications, and the articles are both interesting and informative. Versions and Stacking, for example. Contrast that with posts like Aperture in Somalia, may be a little light on the details that feed your curiosity about the applications they are rich in story and images.

My own application of choice since the first time I used a beta has been Adobe Lightroom, but I have been planning on looking at both Aperture and Nikons own Capture NX before pulling the trigger on the 1.0 license.

Yay! I really dug the free 10 pack of Flickr MiniCards from Moo.com and had to have more. Now my order of 100 is on their way.

Lately it seems I’ve been carrying some bad luck with me when it comes to interesting photographic subjects around town.

Case 1: The Delicious Chicken Dinners sign.

Now gone after the store got a new awning.

Case 2: The old swing set at a nearby park.

Now removed along with some other (newer?) climbing things.

JPG Magazine, started by Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ a few years ago, went through some big changes a few issues ago and have turned themselves into a very creative take on using a ‘community’ to submit to and create content for their print magazine (yes, I said print).

They’ve taken the high road and have made their site about collecting and sharing quality photographs and have added themes for each issue that users can submit to, get ranked, and perhaps get included in a future issue.

I’ve been watching with interest, and enjoying the photographs others have posted but not made a submission of my own until now. So allow me to take the low road and ask you to vote on whether you’d like this photo to be part of the “Embrace the Blur” theme for issue 8.

This shot of mine was taken from this set.

[EDIT: Though I do have to say as I hack away at things to make my post not look busted, their javascript embedded vote link is a bit rough and hacky]

Does the world need another Web2.0 Community Video Sharing Massive Group Social Networking site? Treemo thinks so, and I might agree.

On my trip through my feed reader this morning I ran across a post by Jason Kottke talking about how he recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex II camera in hopes of taking some digital shots through the lenses of the old camera.

It just so happens I had sitting on my shelf as decoration (has a few cracks and dings that prevented me from trying to use it for its intended purposes) a Duaflex III. 4 minutes with the cardboard insert from an Amazon shipment for the sides of the hood and the last bits of a roll of gaffers tape and I have my own TTV ‘contraption’.

Operation is a bit awkward given I’m not using an SLR, but a smaller Nikon 995, and I need to spend some time looking for the right focus and zoom settings to get the best results, but it shows promise. Here’s one of my first test shots (no out of camera processing):

I only had the time to give it a try and see if I can focus it and if I’ve cut off any glare (pretty good). Hopefully I’ll have some time this week to take it out for some real use.