Readers may have noticed by now that I have a cheap but serviceable digital camera that I’ve been using to take pictures which occasionally show up here on the blog. (Hey, there’s another thing that the External Deliverer, in Its benevolence, might bring me: a nicer digital camera.)
I’ve been playing with geolocation for a while now. Just recently, I started also doing some crude playing with High Dynamic Range digital photography. It’s obviously going to take me some work to get it figured out and get better results, but what I’m getting so far doesn’t look too bad, at least in my own opinion. Kind of surreal, like Mars Rover pictures…
I’ve discovered that my Handy-Dandy Linux box has access to a couple of tools that make these easy.
I noticed a few days ago that digiKam is actually able to read .gpx format files downloaded from my GPS and then correlate the track from the GPS with the timestamps on the photos automatically, so in what little spare time I have I’ve been going back through my archives of GPS tracks and timestamped photos and trying to find as many to correlate as I can. I managed to get geolocation tagged into pictures from as long ago as three years or so. I also tagged this more recent one. I saw this place half a decade ago and had been wondering if it was still there. Last week we finally had a chance to visit and sure enough, it was there. If you were wondering where one could go to learn to do the Squirrel Dance, here it is.
Today after classes I trudged up to the top of the hill at one corner of the campus with my trusty GPS in hand and took a few pictures, as you can tell. Since Google Earth seems to get most of it’s photos from Panoramio, I’ve started uploading them there. I may also get around to uploading them to flickr one of these days, too. I kind of need some pleasant distraction – I’m starting to hit the “Am I there yet???” phase of the semester. Just another week-and-a-half of classes, then finals, then I’m finally done. At least with the undergraduate stuff.
If you’re bored, there are a couple of additional pictures on the Panoramio site, here. You can also get the ICBM address there, and a .kml file for Google Earth so my pictures will pop up if you happen to run past an area where one of them is while you’re browsing the globe.
