Next camera for the mission

Back in November I achieved the long-sought goal of acquiring the means to capture a scene in three dimensions for real. Given the nature of the weather, I haven't been able to put it to much good use yet, but I'm intending to put it through its paces once the temperature is routinely in the positive numbers again... moreso when it's double digits.

As much as I've always wanted to shoot scenes in 3D without having to worry about whether or not a leaf moved in between exposures – much less anything larger (which has meant that 3D photograph in an urban environment was essentially impossible for me previously), it was never my intention to use the medium exclusively. Frankly, I don't think we're there yet. The facilities for people to routinely view things in three dimensions are probably still years away, and it's a difficult medium to work in (how do you stitch together three or four 3D images into a coherent panorama, for example?). I've continued to carry the G9 with me alongside the W1, and most of the time, I've preferred the G9. The W1 comes out for the icing-on-the-cake shots. This is particularly true since the image quality on the W1 is relatively poor... I don't say that with an air of disappointment; I knew that before I bought it. This is the state of the art, such as it is; it was either this or I waited years to start capturing views in 3D. But when capturing the volume of a view isn't crucial, I tend to prefer the G9. I don't now, and didn't last November, imagine I'd be leaving the G9 on the shelf with the W1 doing it all. It does what it does; the G9 does the rest.

Still, times change, and technology moves on. I've had the G9 for two years now and it's been excellent. But I have my eye on another camera now, one that will provide both new abilities and a streamline workflow for the Millennium Project of recording the here-and-now for posterity. The camera is the Cyber-shot DCS HX5V, one of Sony's two new entries with pretty much the same abilities (the other being the slightly more expensive TX7). There are some cutesy features about the new pair that I wouldn't miss if they weren't there; wireless transfer to certain devices, face recognition, cropping images inside the camera, etc. But they do have some abilities that make me reach for the HX5V.

 

What it won't do

The G9 shoots RAW. That was important to me when I got it, principally because it meant I would have the ability to squeeze shadow and highlight information out of the sensor's recorded data and form a single, wide-ranged HDR image without having to shoot multiple exposures and, again, worry about what moved in between. Like the old S80 I carried around for nearly three years, the HX5V does not record in a RAW format. Strangely enough, when I read that, I didn't have the reaction I would have anticipated. It wasn't so much a turn-off as it was a liberation. One of the things about having the ability to shoot RAW has been the sense of obligation it's imposed on me. For years I've vacillated back and forth using the XT and G9, shooting RAW to get the best image, and then remembering what a huge pain in the ass it is having to process every single image just to get something I can post on Flickr, and going back to shooting JPGs... then looking at all these 'compromise' images and cursing myself for not shooting them RAW... you see what I mean. Combine that with the fact that RAW tends to take up three or four times the space on a drive as the equivalent JPG image and it's been kind of a headache. If technology dealt with RAW images as readily as it does with JPGs and a 12MB file size weren't an issue, I'd shoot RAW all the time. But it doesn't, and it is, so having that decision taken out of my hands is, strangely, sort of a relief. I didn't think I'd see it that way.

The HX5V also doesn't have in-camera controls for sharpness, saturation, contrast, and the like. I'm not overly bothered about that because I never messed with that stuff in the camera anyway. Sharpness? Either a shot's clear or it's not; if it is, I'm certainly capable of improving it in Photoshop. Ditto the colour.

The G9 has a time-lapse video feature that's kind of kicky, fun to use experimentally, but really, hasn't amounted to much for me. I know how to do the same thing with far more compelling results using real-time video and Premiere. So that's not something I'll miss day-to-day either.

The HX5V doesn't have an optical view finder. Now, even though I haven't used a view finder on any camera but my XT since about two weeks into owning the S80 (got tired of nose smudges on the LCD), it kind of bugs me that I'm forced to depend on a battery-powered technology to compose shots. I shouldn't be; it's been how I've been doing it for about five years now, but... I just don't like not having the option. Still, obviously, it's not central to my concerns.

What it will do (why I'm interested)

The thing that led me to discovering this camera was that I'm increasingly fed up with the way I have to embed GPS data in my photographs. The process is cumbersome and cranky at every turn. First, there's the PhotoTrackr itself. When it works, it works pretty well, but there are times when it completely fails to bring up a signal. Secondly, it's often out of sync with the camera(s) in question, and when you're moving in a car, even six or seven seconds makes a difference that could, one day, be really misleading to someone without the same visual references that exist today (I mean, that's why they enabled GPS in EXIF in the first place). Sometimes the battery runs out. The software for transferring and applying the log files, not infrequently, can't find the PhotoTrackr on the COM port it's expecting to find it. All told, it works, but not as well as I'd like. Honestly, it's like working with 1990 technology in 2010.

The HX5V has GPS built into it; it's among the first cameras that do (there have been others over the past two or three years, but surprisingly, not that many). I think soon, this will be the norm, but for now, it's rare. Now, I don't know the HX5V will be any better at acquiring and keeping a signal than the PhotoTrackr. But even if it isn't, it eliminates the concern about a separate battery dying (if I run out of juice on the camera, I don't NEED the GPS facility anyway), and the rigmarole of uploading log files, matching them to photos, and having to overwrite the metadata.

Relatedly, the HX5V also has a compass, and can not only record where the photo was taken, but in which direction the camera was oriented. This is actually something I can't do now, and have been waiting to see for over a year. Someone has finally done it. I can't tell you the number of times I've looked at old photos – and not just those taken by others 50 year ago, but my own from unfamiliar places just a summer or two in the past – and spent ages arguing with myself as to which way I was looking. This facility will, hopefully, spare people in the future that kind of head scratching. Even if those "people" turn out only to be me!

The HX5V also has a couple of new facilities that will save someone like me a lot of time in post-processing. First of all, it has what Sony calls "Intelligent Sweep Panorama". That is, the camera itself has the ability to generate a panorama simply by the user sweeping it through (approx.) 130, 180, and 270 degree sweeps. The camera, which can take 10 10MP photos per second, does the work to sew the view together. Apparently, it even compensates for moving objects in the scene, though I'm not expecting great things from that. Basically, if I can stand on a hilltop or a sleepy rural intersection and get a lovely pano of what it looks like today in three or four seconds, without having to spend 15 minutes finding the photos and dragging them into another application that, as often as not, ignores half of them or craps out when the memory ceilings, that'll be just fine with me.

Another thing that will save time, if it works as advertized, is what Sony calls "Backlight Correction HDR". One of the things I've always hated about digital photography is how it never seems to represent the range of shading you remember having seen with your eye... a blue sky and details in the medium shadows. Probably it's an illusion, a trick of the mind in retrospect, but nevertheless, that's how we're used to thinking we remember seeing something, and how we expect to see it represented. The HX5V has the ability to take two different exposures in a faction of a second and merge them into an HDR shot that extends the range of detail, so that highlights and colours are preserved and shadow detail is recorded, all in the same shot. That's something that used to require a lot of work in Photoshop and, realistically, a RAW exposure (or three rock-steady AEB shots across two seconds and change). If I can routinely have pleasing shots of earth and sky together, right out of the camera, that will be gratifying.

The camera also has an image stabilization system that seems to have come from Sony's camcorder line. I gather Sony has only recently gotten over its fear of cannibalizing sales by porting its good ideas from camcorders to point-and-shoots; the facilities they've given the $450 (CDN) HX5V were features of Sony's $1000 HDRTG5V camcorder just last year. Among them is a gyro-managed optical stabilization system that, I'm hoping, will make for better road videos as we record the roads of the rural fringe that will one day be the wide boulevards of shopping malls, condo complexes, and housing tracts. The camera also records in full HD, though given the memory and speed requirements, I'm expecting to use that rather sparingly.

There are down sides to it. I don't think the battery usage is as robust as it is on the G9, for one thing. I'm concerned that the only format for images is JPG, because it's a lossy format, though if they're using minimal compression and the optics are good that shouldn't turn out to be a big concern; after all, the idea is to record something that will be informative 25, 50, or 100 years from now, with as little overhead on my end as possible. I believe this camera will do that and be the workhorse for the next two or three years of the project. Hoping to get hold of one within the month. Stay tuned.

P-Doug and the new tech

Saturday amounted to my first real opportunity to go on a geotagged hike. Now that P-Doug has the S-80, I thought he might be interested in putting it through its paces. I suggested the closed part of Humberline Drive in Rexdale, but he was anxious to go further afield, and suggested hiking Dominion Road (the closed part of what's now Dominion Street in the little hamlet of Brimstone) up into the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park.

It snowed quite a bit on Friday and it was touch-and-go as to whether or not we'd actually go. In fact, it was well after 11 when I heard from him. I thought about phoning but given that he was one doing the driving this time, I decided that was undue pressure. I was within minutes of taking off on my own to wander Humberline when P-Doug did phone me, and about half an hour later we were on the road.

We were well up Winston Churchill Boulevard before I remembered to turn the PhotoTrackr on. Luckily I did this before I started taking photos. It did a really admirable job of keeping the trail we drove and walked for hours, with only a couple of gaps, mostly due to our being stationary indoors.

First thing, we drove to Erin to go to the bakery there that he and G favour. I didn't buy anything myself, though of course the temptation was thick in the air. After that, we drove up into Brimstone and parked at the end of the road. We set off up the trail, immediately noticing tracks laid down by skis. P-Doug eventually realized that they were actually two sets of skis, one wider and one narrower. We never did see the people who laid down the tracks, but they sure did make the going easier for us.

The trees were hung heavy with wet snow. It was really beautiful. The air was around freezing and almost absolutely still. My feet were a little bit cold (no, I was wearing shoes, honest; just not particularly wintery ones), but we did wander up the trail for more than half an hour. I had meant to keep an eye out for the chimney we saw standing alone last autumn, but we never did catch sight of it. What we did see was a couple of bugs on the snow who'd come out tragically too early; a midge and a spider.

I was shooting mostly RAW in anticipation of 'finishing' the shots using Photomatix to bring out the details. My results were uneven and not wholly satisfying, though some were pleasing enough. If I had the chance to do it again, I'd shoot AEB spreads and see if they were superior in bleak, low-contrast situations. But I have the feeling there's the rub: if there's not much light and not much contrast, you're probably never going to get good HDR results anyway. P-Doug was shooting mostly AEB spreads, so it will be informative to see what kind of results he eventually gets.

I think it had been his intention to get as far into the park as we were when we came down from the rise at the east the first time we were there, about a year and a half ago, when I remember we encountered a Russian fellow trying to get his bearings and met a young couple coming in from the route we ourselves were walking Saturday. I remember testing the waters of the Credit and pronouncing them too cold for our indulgence, even if there had been sufficient cover. Well, we never got that far on Saturday. It was starting to get uncomfortably cold for me, in street shoes, and to be honest, after half an hour or so, one bend after another of snow-laden trees was starting to lose its charms, especially when the only reward was to see a big plain of snow at the risk of frostbite, or at least doubling the duration of my discomfort. I gently wet-blanketed the trek and suggested a retreat to warmer and more interesting digs, and with some small reluctance, P-Doug indulged me. But it seemed to me all our mission objectives had been met, even if we didn't land on the plain and plant the flag... I'd geotracked a hike matched to many photos, and P-Doug had had ample opportunities to both shoot AEB spreads and videotape (is there a better word for that, now that there's no tape involved?) this, that, and the other thing (mostly me, playing with tree limbs and relieving them of snow burdens). More-ambitious treks call for better weather conditions, I think. Either that or I have to go buy real winter boots!

Similarly, I had plans to do a lot of time lapse photography downtown. Those plans didn't pan out, either. When we arrived downtown, it was surprisingly foggy. Not absolutely socked-in by any means, but enough that the top of the CN Tower wasn't visible. Given that filming the light going up the Tower was a big part of what I wanted to accomplish, it seemed like I'd be better off just waiting for another weekend. We ended up passing through the downtown core and heading east to a bar we'd been to once before, in warmer weather in the summer of 2006, I think. The bar was named for the Keating Channel, alongside which it resides (apparently it used to belong to the Irish Rovers). We had a thoroughly pleasant couple of hours there. It wasn't loud or very busy; we shared a pitcher of Keith's Red, and P-Doug had potato skins while I indulged in broccoli and cheese soup in a bread bowl. Very nice! Our waitress was an attractive and attentive African-Canadian woman who chatted us up about photography, in a matter that was never intrusive. I formed a very favourable impression of the place, re-enforcing the one set previously.

Towards the end of our stay, P-Doug asked me if I'd be staying downtown or returning with him to go out with G. I opted for the latter. Conditions had improved but by then, I was less ambitious about photography. We all ended up at Boston Pizza in Scarborough.

Skip forward a day. I'd put P-Doug onto Google Earth because of its facilities to geotag photos, but mostly because its pseudo-3D imagery gives a real sense of what we're facing in our plans to explore a particular river valley this spring or summer. It wouldn't work for him because it barfed on his video card. Combined with the fact he has only USB 1.1 in his computer and the card reader I lent him isn't recognized by his system, it was enough to have him looking for some hardware. He called me out of the blue early Sunday afternoon with plans to go to Tiger Direct. A USB 2.0 card quickly morphed into a potential computer purchase once he saw how low the prices were. Problem was, nearly every "good" computer sported Windows Vista, and it just wasn't worth the hassle. Oh, sure, the guy told us, all you have to do is look up the serial number of your motherboard and then download the XP drivers and put them on a pen memory and scrub the new computer's hard drive and (buy and) install XP on it and install the drivers from the pen memory, oh, sure... not a problem.

Fuck that.

It wasn't my call, but that's what I was thinking. As it turned out, so was P-Doug. We got out of there and went to Factory Direct, where P-Doug snagged a sweet machine, high speed, 2 GB DDR2, 200 GB HDD, for $399. And it had XP on it! He wandered for a minute or two, talking himself into it, and then grabbed it. Even there, it was the only one we saw with the useful OS on it.

It'll be interesting to me to see what happens from here. P-Doug has the S-80, and a computer that can work much more serious mojo than his old one. I'm not sure yet what it will mean for his creative output, but it does open the door to a lot of potential. Once the warm weather's back and hiking becomes more of a joy rather than an ordeal, opportunities will really expand.

Eight weeks till April. :)

Retroactive geotagging with Picasa and Google Earth

I've discovered... wait, discovered? That makes it sound like it was my idea. Let me rephrase that. I've learned, to my utter delight, how to use Picasa and Google Earth to geotag my older photographs... that is, the vast, vast majority of the ones I took before getting my Phototrakr a few months ago.

It didn't work for me right off the bat. Google Earth didn't like something in my setup and when opening in its default setting, it gave me a blank screen where the map was supposed to be. I did a little reading the other day and realized there are three settings for how it opens by default. One is to open in DirectX mode. I tried that and it worked. When Google Earth opens, you're greeted with a globe of the Earth, as if you are approaching it from space. It rotates beneath you to a default position over North America. When you select a location... Toronto, say... it gracefully zooms you in, and from there you can start navigating.

Picasa is great at cataloguing your images. If any of them have EXIF information, which would be pretty much everything I have since I bought the Kodak DC4800 in early 2001, you can select them and then choose Tools > Geotag > Geotag with Google Earth. The pictures are then transferred to a little slider in Google Earth. You select a photo (or possibly more than one; I haven't actually tried that yet) and, dragging the map (yes, the map, not the photo!) to position the specific location under the crosshairs, you click the Geotag button and the location is recorded. When you're done, the geotag information is appended to each tagged photo's EXIF information. Any program or service that can mine that tag, like Flickr, can use it to represent the location on the map where your photo was taken.

To me, this is an important advance. For several years now, cameras have been able to tell you a lot about the circumstances of a photo's creation... the exact time and date it was taken (regardless of what the file info says of creation or modification date), what make and model of camera took it, the aperture, ISO, exposure duration, EV settings, flash, special settings, on and on and on. But there was no way to communicate (or even remember, necessarily) where in the world, the country, the city the photo was taken. Now there is, even for photos not explicitly married to tracking utilities.

I think in a few years it will be common for cameras to have geotracking facilities built right into them. In a way, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already; cell phones are everywhere, as are GPS systems and devices. But until then, we have some effective work-arounds.

My first photo geotagged this way and placed on Flickr (which picked up the geotag)...

Latitude: N 43° 39' 11.03"
Longitude: W 79° 20' 55.93"

GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr: second impressions

Well, the software's kind of buggy. Once you've created a photo group, that's it. Clicking delete does fuck-all. It's bolted in like an iron plate. So I'm stuck with two demo ones that it defaults to and come up every time I try to do something.

Also, trying to apply geotags to older photos doesn't really work. I mean, I think technically it does it. But one photo at a time. And even when you've placed it on the map, the thumbnail of the photo doesn't appear. So it's extremely impractical and simply doesn't work properly.

But, for what I really bought it for — geotagging my trips and archival shots moving forward — it seems to do just fine. So really, I got what I paid for. But I still thing I'll write to them and let them know what doesn't work for me. Then when the next release comes out, who knows?

Geotagged photo from Tuesday:

Latitude:	N 43° 53' 59.5"
Longitude:	W 79° 20' 42.8"
Altitude:	206

GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr: first impressions

Overall, my impressions are positive, and in cases, very much so. It wasn't easy to set the whole thing up, and I wouldn't call the driver installation seamless, but eventually it it was all go.

As I emailed P-Doug this morning:

You should see the thing in action. Something it does that I didn't anticipate, but I got a big charge out of, is play back the trip. When I downloaded the log file, I was first amazed when it suddenly jumped up with a map and there was my whole route on it. Then I noticed there was this play button, so I clicked it and it ran through my drive, including a stop for gas, stops at lights, a more rapid pace along straight-aways... I was just delighted. Then I corralled the photos from that trip and added them. It processed them, showed them on the map, and then offered to embed the GPS data in the EXIF – which is what I was really after, after all. All the rest was cream.

Sadly, while it's possible to embed location data in older photos, it's a hassle. I was hoping it would just be a matter of opening the map, finding the location, and dragging photos onto it and telling it "embed the data". It's not so easy. You pretty much have to re-open the map every time and tell it the approximate location (like "Toronto"), and then keep zooming in and moving the pin to tighter and tighter approximations. So while it's possible, it's such a pain that I can't imagine doing it en masse for trips I took. Hopefully they'll add such functionality in upgrades.

(Hmmm... I didn't try selecting a GROUP of photos and doing this... if I can at least get them all on the map in one shot, then it's just a matter of moving them around. That might make it practical. I'll have to try that this evening.)

Last summer I was considering that little Sony one, but it's only guaranteed to work with their cameras, it was more expensive (this thing was barely a hundred bucks), and it has nowhere near the utility. I'm going to take it for a photowalk at lunchtime and see what I come up with.

Which I did. I'll see how it performs walking instead of driving.

Hit the road, Jack, ...something something photo track...

My GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr has arrived! It's a neat, inexpensive little device that corresponds frequently with the GPS and logs your position as you move. When you get home, its software matches up the log and the timestamps of your photos and then embeds the geographical location in the metadata of the image. This is called "geotagging".

I got the unit at a bargain price on eBay… a bargain because at the time I ordered it, the Canadian dollar was worth $1.08 US. I wanted it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I wanted to be able to look back in the future a know just where I was, to within a few yards, when I took a particular image. Second, since I'm hoping to start recording the city (especially in 3D) for people in the future, it's important they be able to tell exactly where a photo was taken, especially if the location changes a great deal.