I blame Santa. It was he that started me down this road.
It was he that surprised me with a shiny new Nikon D200 a few years back. Smart, he was, as it happily mated with all my old Nikon lenses, lenses that were pretty much gathering dust in my closet. He eased me in to the dark world of digital photography. And, at first I was happy, wandering the night streets of Brussels, amazed at the versatility and just down-right fun of modern digital photography. But soon, I wanted more — more lenses, fancy carrying cases, tripods, books, and filters; batteries and bling.
The birthday fairy — an enabler working in cahoots with Santa — served only to fan my addiction. She delivered an amazing piece of glass; a Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR zoom lens. Oh my. With this combo, I’m almost superfluous in the process. You want a lens, this is the one. One lens to rule them all, One lens to find them, One lens to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…
Between the camera and the glass, I need only twirl a few dials and pretend like I know the difference between aperture and exposure, mutter a few incantations about depth of field, and… voila! I have pictures, pretty pictures. I was caught, before I knew it. I’m now carting Nikky the Nikon, everywhere, buying her presents and shiny bling. And, her latest bling is a marvelous thing — automatic geo-tagging.
It’s the lazy man’s way to avoid dragging photos willy-nilly around on the Flickr map. It’s perfect for me. Quite frankly, it’s a great substitution for organic memory, as my poor organic memory was not up to the task of actually remembering just exactly where this or that picture was taken. Was it Traben, Trabach, or Trier? Was it Haute-Garonne or Lot-et-Garonne or Tarn-et-Garonne? Where is the Garonne? Is that the Dordogne or the Lot? Is this France? Who am I and why am I here?
[This whole process, of course, is complicated by the fact that I can't spell half the towns in France anyway. Just when I think I have a word "right" the incessant need to swap vowel and consonant between regions trips me up.]
You see, while the camera can faithfully remember a thousand shots a day, my memory can’t. It only gets worse, as I try to sort through them one or two or three weeks later. So, the latent engineer in me takes over. I call it creative laziness — my incessant drive to figure out easier ways to do things.
Thus, with enthusiasm, I greeted my latest gadget when it arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Ok, I admit it, I am very — almost (but not quite) pathologically — fond of gadgets, and this was one cool gadget. It was, after all somewhat near my birthday. It was after all only 150 bucks. It would after all save me hours of time! Besides, Nikky would love it. It was important. This little item would save me much embarrassment by automatically adding longitude and latitude to my amateur attempts at photography. That’s right: Automatic geo-tagging, GPS for my camera. Oh boy, would Jane be jealous.
It’s called a Geomet’r and it’s designed to fit right on to my particular Nikon. It fits the D300, D3, D200, D2Hs and D2Xs, as well as the Fujifilm S5 Pro. About the size of a small box of matches, it plugs into the camera and stealthily slips not only the latitude and longitude into the EXIF data, but the altitude as well. Now I know not only where I was, when it was, but just exactly how high above sea-level I might have been. Ain’t that just neat?
Gavin’s Nikon with Geomet’r GPS attached
For $150 it does what it says it does. There are some upsides and downsides, however. First the downsides:
- Despite what the docs say, it seems to take upwards of a minute or two to warm up and find itself. The docs say 45 seconds from a cold start. My experience is that it’s more like 120 to 200 seconds. Given that warm up time, one is tempted to just leave it on. However, there is a slight problem with leaving it on that I mention below.
- You need to be outside to use it. Like most GPS devices, it doesn’t work well without clear access to the sky. I’ve found that even a heavy tree canopy can be a problem.
- The way the connecter connects to the camera body is kind of awkward. It juts out from the side of the camera and makes it difficult to drop into my carrying case. Moreover, I think that it gets jostled around in the bag sometimes, and gets accidently turned on. This is a drag for reasons I also mention below.
- This baby hits the juice like a sailor on shore-leave. I find it cuts my battery life at least in half, if not by two-thirds. This is also why you just can’t leave it on and why having it get accidently turned on when jostled is a drag. Typically, the battery life on the D200 is extraordinary. Rarely did I run out of juice. But with the Geomet’r it can kill a battery dead in less than a few hours. I looked into getting a super-powerful multi-battery pack but decided to just invest in a few more batteries. I typically travelled with two – one in the camera and one spare. I’m upping that to four (proving once again that gadgets beget more gadgets).
- Finally, it has some strange bugs. Namely, occasionally, it seems to just lock up the camera. The LCD display seems OK, and the battery level seems OK, but it won’t take a picture until you click the camera “Off” and then “On” again. When this starts to happen, the battery indicator usually drops to one bar, and I switch batteries, so I think it’s a power problem.
On the up side, it does what it says. It’s the lazy man’s way to add latitude and longitude and altitude information to your pictures. Here’s what I like:
- You’ve got options when it comes to where you put it. I attached it to the leather reinforcement of the carrying strap using the super-Velcro that came with the unit. There is also a small-plastic piece that fits in the camera’s hot shoe, but I find it nicer and more out of the way attached to the carrying strap. The two pairs of Velcro that came with the unit are the “super” sort of Velcro that doesn’t wear out. That’s good. The curly cable is also nice, as it keeps things out of the way but flexible.
- The whole thing seems well designed. My only quibble is the location of the “On/Off” telltale. It’s a small red diode located on the underside. It flashes on and off when seeking a satellite lock, and burns a steady red when on and locked. If I had chosen to put the device in the hot-shoe, I suppose it would be more visible, but I still think it would be better located on top or something, or maybe a blue diode instead of a red one.
- It works. Pictures are tagged with the proper info, and when I uploaded them to Flickr, they all appear right on the map just where I was when I took the photo. My memory is spared the heavy burden of keeping track of where I am, or was, or might be.
As I mentioned, it does what it’s supposed to. You can see the results of a few hours I spent wandering in the Bon Air Rose gardens in Arlington, Virginia. It took a fresh battery, but it tagged all the photos. On Flickr, the mapping is not that accurate, but when using Picasa and Google Earth, it was within a few feet. Here is the Flickr set, if you’d like to see the results. As you can see, I seem to like bees and bugs. Thanks Santa.
