Daz

The basic concept of GPS logging is simple - a small device records where you are every [insert time period] seconds. It does this by working out where you are on Earth in relation to some satellites in space!

Holux M241 GPS Logger

My logger is a Holux M241. There are so many to chose from though, all pretty similar.

As you can see, it’s about the same size as a small robot. This means that it fits nicely into a pocket, or a bag compartment, or a bumbag, or wherever you want to put it. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it can “see” the positioning satellites in the sky.

When you get home you can transfer your GPS log onto your computer. The Holux comes with some clunky software to do it. It does it’s job, but it’s ugly and slightly confusing to start with.

Lightroom Plugin

The main reason I like to log where I am is so I can attach the info to my photos (’geotagging’). I came accross a rather nifty plug in for Lightroom which does this easily. You select the photos you want to geotag, select your GPS log file and hey presto, the plugin geotags all the photos.

The plugin matches up the time you took the photo with a time in the GPS log. Don’t worry if your camera doesn’t match GPS time - you can supply an offset (I worked out the offset by photoing the clock on the GPS device!)

If you don’t have a GPS Logger, you can manually find the location on Google Earth and the plugin will assign it to the selected photo(s).

If you’re interested, you can download the plugin here - you’ll need Adobe Lightroom 2+ to use it.

Flickr

I mainly use Flickr to display my photos (I may have mentioned it once or twice). They have a great feature where you can add photos to a map. This allows me to keep track of where my photos were taken; and also allows other users to browse a map and see what’s about.

Before geotagging, it sometimes took ages to find on the map where the photo was taken and put it there. Flickr/Yahoo don’t have very good aeriel maps in my area so placing things on it was very hit-and-miss.

If you upload a geotagged photo you can add it to a map in just a couple of clicks! Great!

Here are some of the photos I’ve tagged using the workflow mentioned above.

You can view them on the Flickr map here.

Other things to do

There’s other things you can do with the data. You could make a map of where you’ve been on Google Earth.

There are probably other uses, like for jogging/training, but I haven’t found them out yet.

I’m going on holiday in a few days - I can’t wait to try it out. Must take some spare/rechargable batteries though as it seems to munch through them. I wonder what it’ll do on an aeroplane trip

I got this funky film camera for Christmas. It is an entry-level 35mm film SLR. The great thing about it is that it uses all the lenses I have for my digital SLR

It doesn’t have many features - you can change the exposure time & aperture. And not much else (unless of course I haven’t found them). My major annoyance is that the settings reset if you flip between modes. There’s one auto-focus point. And it feels a bit clunky. I’m not whining though - I’ve taken some of my best film photos with this camera.

There is one feature I’ve not yet mentioned - it has a setting to take multiple exposures (one or more photos on the same piece of film). I’ve been using this feature a lot, and having a lot of fun with it. I’ve got an article about multiple exposures coming soon…

I found a few boxes of this on eBay a few months ago - I’d never heard of it and thought it would be interesting to use. It turns out that it’s just a re-packaged version of Kodak Gold for foreign markets.

I don’t really know what to say about it - there’s nothing overly special about this film. The colours are OK - possibly “retro” in some instances, and the blues are cool. In the right sunny conditions, it can get a nice saturation going on - alas I didn’t use it much on sunny days! The grain is nothing to get excited or whine about. It’s just a standardish negative film.

If you’re reading this on the website, you’ll notice a rather major change. I’ve ditched the Monotone photoblog theme that I loved so much!

This site

This site is going to be used for more wordy articles (again). I often find myself writing things like film reviews for other websites - I want to keep a record of these on my site too in case things went wrong elsewhere. The Monotone theme often limited my capacity to that (that said, it worked in some cases).

Now I’ve said and done this, I probably won’t write anything again. I’ll try to though - I’ve got a few new gadgets and lenses to talk about.

Photo Site

Don’t fear, I have set up a second (photo)blog that uses the theme. It’s even more stripped down and customised though. No comments. No descriptions. Even more bending to suit my needs. An improved archive/categories page. And some other bits I’ve probably forgotten about. It’s going to be used to highlight my more awesome photographs, kinda like a portfolio type thing. You can view it at www.dazb.co.uk/photos.

I almost certainly won’t be making my theme changes available to the public. I tried giving some of my changes to a buddy but things went seriously wrong and it didn’t work properly. My customisations to the theme are very particular to my requirements and quirks - to modify the theme and release it with less quirkiness would take more time than I have. Sorry!

I found a few shots of this film in a sale. The Konica Chrome R-100 was replaced by Konica Centuria Chrome 100, which seems to get favourable reviews - subtle colours, nothing too crazy when cross-processed, and a cool retro grain.

Expiring in 2002, I didn’t know what to expect. Eager to try it all out, I shot a whole film in just a few hours - a rare occurance for me.

When developed, the negative was a beautiful deep purple. This led to… yep, green photos. And my, what a green they are. Nothing over the top, but it really dominates the photo. In some situations it can be quite subtle, and gives the retro feel mentioned with the newer films.

Oh and the grain. I don’t know what I can say about it. It’s a nice, noticable, coarse, gritty grain - something you’d usually see on higher ISO photos. Not what you’d expect from a ISO100 film!

If you can find some you should definitely snap this up - it’s both mega-rare now and gives fantastic results.

I’ve had a box of Fuji Velvia 50 sitting in my cupboard for six months. Being an ISO50 film, I decided that I wanted to use it on sunny days. Those sunny days finally came and I loaded it into my Lomo LCA. A fairground came to town which helped me finish the film really quickly - a rare occurance for me!

I didn’t really know what to expect when I cross-processed the film. All I knew was that it should give awesome results. And it did. The film itself came out a reddy-purple colour, which meant the photos would have a nice greeny colourshift to them..

The results were amazing! Blue skies came out an amazing turquoisey-blue-green colour. Greens became even greener. Reds and yellow popped out. Great.

I recommend that you try some of this film and use it on a sunny day! You’ll be amazed too.

Cows are definitely high up in my list of “favourite things to photograph”. Sometimes I like to go into my local cow field and just wait. The curious ones often end up investigating what I’m up to, and then they hang around to pose for photos.

When photographed with a wide lens, these curious little animals look even more awesome, cute and funny

NotSoWildLife.com

A post about cows wouldn’t be complete without a quick mention of one of my favourite blogs. NotSoWildLife.com contains fabulous photographs of animals from all possible angles - teeth and tongues feature heavily Go check it out!

I’ve been using Agfa Precisa CT100 for a little while, and then came accross this on the ebay. After a bit of research, it seems that it was discontinued in 2005 and was apparently one of the most awesome films Agfa ever made.

It has been sitting in my storage drawer for a few months waiting for awesome sunny weather - it’s an ISO50 film so can only really be used in the sun! I loaded it into my Lomo LCA and took it to the seaside a few times.

I am beyond impressed with the results - the colours are amazingly saturated, yet not too ugly. I love it.

Every time I try a new film, it usually ends up as my “favourite film“. This was the case, again, with Kodak Ektachrome E100VS. The colours were mega saturated (the VS stands for Vivid Saturation). The reds pop out. And the slight green-shift of the film makes blue skies look slightly turquoisey.

Awesome.

Mmmm signs are so colourful

Monotone Theme

In slightly nerdy news, I’ve hacked my Monotone theme a bit more.

An avaerage photo on my site has 426400 pixels. The code only sampled 5 of these pixels in a photo to work out the best colour to use - the 4 “rule of thirds” points and the centre point. I found that this gave reasonable results, but sometimes nothing like what I imagined. If most of the image was yellow, but by some chance most of the sample points were black, then it would return a dark/blackish colour.

I’ve modified it to sample around 26000 pixels (if I’ve done my maths right). This seems to give a much better average colour It’s probably totally unnecessary, but I like the results.