Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Techno gadgets that can help your photography. Here's two I use.

Hi Pentax friends. I'm glad you could join in.

How many times have you taken hundreds or even thousands of pictures on a weekend photo shoot? How many times have you wondered where some of the keepers were shot at?

I admit it , I have done that so many times it's not even funny anymore. Well, being the "techno- gadget" nerd that I am, I found a reasonably cheap way to help my memory.

Two new gadgets found their way to my general photography stuff, although both can be used for other purposes. The first purchase was a Garmin Nuvi 200 GPS. I can use it with my "Photographic Buddy" to navigate my way to any place in the USA and Canada. It also can give me coordinates. With the coordinates, I can pinpoint the exact place any or all of my photographs were taken. The problem is that my camera and the GPS don't talk to each other.


That brings me to the second gadget. Tonight I purchased a Sony ICD-P620 Digital recorder. It's good for 261 hours of recording. That's way longer than a weekend of photo shoot. The recording can be downloaded to my computer through a USB port. An installation and software CD allows the translation to voice to text. So until Pentax design cameras with a built-in GPS and recorder, I can use both to record the location and description of each picture or group of pictures. You just read the coordinates aloud and add any description necessary to trigger my old gray matter. It requires a little work, but it's well worth the effort when you try to sort-out your pictures. With software like Lightroom, you can add text and coordinates to the exiff files for a more permanent storage.



Thank you for reading,

Yvon Bourque

3 comments:

Marisa said...

Perhaps one day you will be able to tell your recorder to tell your GPS to drive your "buddy" to take pictures with your Pentax. One step photography is underway ladies and gentlemen .... :)

Unknown said...

Nobody can drive my Buddy, but future Pentax will indeed have GPS, video and voice recording, and other gizmo.

Paucal said...

Hi Yvon,
You might have a look at a stand alone GPS logger.

For example I use the Sony CS-1 GPS. Basically it will log your position while you are walking/driving. Then you can sync your photos with their GPS position based on their timestamp. You just have to make sure that your camera time settings are correct. IT works pretty well.

Bye