A sense of where I was

This morning I took my camera, a new GPS receiver attached to its hot shoe, up to the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, one of my favorite spots for photography. My goal was to see how well the GPS works in embedding geographical latitude and longitude, altitude and compass direction data into the digital files of my photographs at the instant I take them.

I stopped on the footbridge between the Botanic Garden's main island and the visitor center and took a quick shot (above) of the frozen channel between lagoons just southeast of the bridge. Then I went home and loaded the photograph file into my computer and called it up with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software.

Quickly I clicked a button that took me over the wi-fi to Google Maps, and the result (considerably enlarged) is shown in the screen-grab illustration below. The green arrow marks the spot where I was standing when I took the shot. The red "A" symbol marks the point where the camera was aimed. The arrow and the symbol are absolutely dead on. [Later: I was mistaken about the nature of that "A" symbol. It simply marks the mailing address nearest to the arrow—in this case, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022. That's still useful.]

The point, of course, is that weeks, months and even years from now, I will be able to recover from the computer's memory, if not my own, the exact spot where the photograph was taken.

Soon I'll be riding the California Zephyr through winding canyons of the Colorado Rockies and twisting ridges of the Sierra Nevada, shooting madly out the train's windows in the service of gathering photographs for the upcoming e-edition of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. If all goes well, I'll be able to pinpoint (and describe) the location of every photograph with perfect accuracy rather than relying on my aging brain's ability to recall places and details.

Isn't that absolutely cool?

A sense of where you were

The device on top of the camera is a GPS receiver.

One of the tasks of a travel  author is to take decent photographs of the locales he is writing about, both as aides-memoires for the text and icing on the book's cake in the form of a photo section. Come March, the Lady Friend and I will be taking a ten-day-long trip to San Francisco Bay aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr primarily to gather new photos for the upcoming e-edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America.

As a photographer I tend to be an indiscriminate shooter, pointing the camera at anything and everything that appears in front of me, hoping to remember later what the subjects were all about and especially where they were shot. Is that a photo of the Colorado River at Dotsero or was it Orestod? Does this abandoned rail yard lie at Soldier Summit or somewhere else?

Some years ago I took a shot of a beautiful rock formation from the open vestibule window of a private car behind an eastbound Zephyr, but never used it anywhere because I couldn't identify the locale. Only after seeing someone else's similar picture of the same place a few weeks ago did I realize that I'd captured the western approach to Castle Gate, Utah, one of the lordliest sights possible from American rails. It's going to go right into the e-book of Zephyr.

Of course I should have taken notes on the individual frames, as a good photojournalist should, but "should" and "did" have different meanings. As a writer I am careful to do due diligence, but as a photographer I just have been too undisciplined.

But now there is a brand new gadget in my photo bag that I hope will make life much easier for me.

It is a Pentax O-GPS1, an inexpensive ($200)  little GPS receiver that attaches to the hot shoes of the current crop of Pentax digital single-lens-reflex cameras.

The receiver records not only the precise latitude and longitude of the spot where the photographer was standing when he snapped the shutter, but also its altitude above sea level and the compass direction in which the camera was pointing.

The camera embeds in the digital file of the photo all this information, along with the customary "metadata" about the f-stop, shutter speed, sensor sensitivity (or ISO), lens focal length, camera make and model, etc.

When I upload the photo files into my computer, I can use special geotagging software to find their precise locations on Google Earth or a similar mapping site. Being able to locate on a map the exact spots where I took my shots is going to be an enormous help.

That is, if the device works as I hope it will. I don't yet know if it will lock on to at least four satellites from the windows of a train speeding at 79 miles an hour, or if it can lock on from deep in a canyon.  We'll find out in February, when the Lady Friend and I will take Amtrak's Capitol Limited to Washington, D.C.

Macrophotography

What am I going to do for kicks instead of fly a little airplane?

No more ten-mile hikes in the mountains -- bad knees. No more gourmet meals -- am on a heart-healthy diet. And so on. Gettin' old, y'know.

So I've decided to expand upon an old passion, photography. With a bit of the proceeds from last week's sale of Gin Fizz, my old Cessna 150, I put together a tabletop macrophotography kit -- a 90mm Tamron macro lens for my Pentaxes, a $50 collapsible fabric light box and two $10 desk lamps from Office Depot for illumination. Hardly a professional outfit, but good enough for learning how to take pictures of small things.

Yesterday I experimented with a few three-inch-long locomotives preserved from an old hobby, model railroading. The first results are now on my photo blog. Not too shabby, I think, for a rank beginner.

Next I'm going to apply this technique to flower photography. The soft, even and diffuse illumination that light tents yield is supposed to enhance the detail of small blooms rather than hide them in harsh shadows, as flash or direct sunlight often does.

Hmm. Winter is almost here, so for experimental subjects I'll have to buy bouquets at the supermarket. After the camera session I can present them to the Lady Friend when she comes home. Two birds with one stone.

When spring comes, bugs. This means I will have to figure out how to stun them so they'll hold still for their portraits.

Life is a learning experience, as they say.