Tech Trends

My wife and I are planning a trip to Europe in March. We’re both pretty jazzed-up about it. Unfortunately, procrastination in the planning process forced us to surrender her passport to the mercy of the U.S. Department of State yesterday, and we’re less than 6 weeks out from our departure date. Yikes. That extra $60 to expedite the shipping had better come up spades…who knew getting married would cause such a hassle? No one warned us about all the name-changing fiascos we would have to endure. FYI, since October 31st, 2006, you must make an appoinment in advance to visit the passport/claims office. Don’t let that catch ya off-guard. It can take up to 2 weeks just to get in! Check out the details at travel.state.gov, especially if you’re heading out of the country.

One of the most exciting points of preparation for our trip is that we needed a new camera. I decided to go digital. Scott and I located a Nikon D200 on eBay packaged with a kit fulla great accessories like lenses, tripods, memory cards, and adapters… It remains to be seen whether or not spending this month’s paycheck on it was a good or bad decision. I guess even if I have to trade it in for rent money on March 1st, it’ll be the most fun 2 weeks of the year so far! (Don’t crawl about Springfield’s pawn shops lookin’ to steal it either.)

The Nikon D200 has a slew of fantastic features, not the least exciting of which being its GPS-ready interface. GPS you say? What good is that on a camera? Well, that’s what I said at first. It only took a couple of minutes of brainstreaming for me to realize the potential of encoding your images with location information. How cool would it be to plot my trip through Europe using JPEGs? I began to wander aimlessly through dreams of GoogleMaps-laden halls littered with pictures of Eastern Europe, and right there at the front was me in my dirndls and lederhosen standing triumphantly before my awestruck friends as I showed off my vacation website complete with all my pictures plotted to map points! …All that dreaming came to an end as I realized that it was $100 for the adapter cord, and I don’t own a GPS.

Seriously though, it’s already being done (as is everything else, it seems). After a quick Google search, I came across the site of Ruth Happel at wildportaits.com. Here’s a picture of her Nikon D200 confidently outfitted with a GPS system:

I’m inspired. She posted a great blog about it as well, documenting her experiences/opinions with different GPS systems and adapters. However, it was her map data that really drew me in. Check out her hike on Squak Mountain and her trip to the zoo! Ruth, you’re makin’ me jealous! Here’s a screenshot from her page:

Simple trips made interesting. So I’m thinking: “If that’s what this technology can do with a simple trip, what could it do with an intrisically intriguing endeavor into the interesting entrancements in of inner Italy? Or Germany? Or Switzerland?” Well, I may not get a chance to find out on this trip. But “there exists no dream worth chasing if it cannot satisfy*.” …and this concept appears quite satisfying!

Anyway, the EXIF information embedded in digital images really does expand the horizons of creative organization; it can already hold time and date information, as well as image dimensions and information about the image type. What’s left after adding in the location? It’ll be really exciting when, every time I take a picture, it shoots straight to this blog with the time, date, location, my current mood, my favorite baseball team, and a couple of Bavarian souvenirs.

– Philip

*lyric taken from Circle of Dust’s self-titled album.