Albuquerque on Flickr's World Map

Today, I pull out my most used, most important and infinitely valuable tool for photographers or well, anyone for that matter. Whenever I travel I create an itinerary of places I want to go, see and when. Sometimes my travel buddies have no idea what I’m doing and think we’re traveling a dirt road or hiking a mile uphill because I’ve simply lost my mind.

Lets say you’re going on a trip and want to know the hot spots of the area. What if I told you that at a glance you can get recommendations on all of the photographic hot spots of an area (which is of interest to photographers and non alike), an idea of what the area looks like, and even see examples of how certain must-see locations of that spot is shot.. Instantly. No buying a guide book, asking people for recommendations, etc..

Sounds like something out of the future. And it’s available right now and it’s oh so simple but every time I share this with friends, the look of amazement really surprises me.

Enter Flickr. Go to Flickr.com, click the drop down next to explore and choose ‘World Map’. Use the find tool to search for a city and zoom in so that the city limits are all visible in the window.

Now wait. Eventually you’ll start seeing red dots appearing on the map quicker than chicken pox at that odd ’sleepover’ your parents made you go on when you were young.

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Brawndo - The Thirst Mutilator

Brawndo is a fictional beverage, well, was a fictional beverage from the movie ‘Idiocracy’ by Mike Judge. And now Brawndo exists in real life. It’s not like those other drinks where they put sugar water and a drop of food coloring in a can and slap on a label from your favorite cartoon. Brawndo is a real energy drink, it’s tasty and sometimes gets me through the day, night, next day and sometime into next week. To quote some promotional Brawndo videos, drinking Brawndo is like shaving your chest with a lawnmower, riding a dinosaur attached to a rocket or sitting on a 300′ pony covered in chainsaws. You get the point.

What better way to show everyone a few beverage tricks of the trade than to shoot an ice cold, refreshing glass of my favorite beverage?

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Whenever you’re out and about, look for shots to add to your collection. Specifically, clouds.

Clouds over the Southwest

Cloud shots with just clouds are usually considered boring, if you want to make your sky shots stand out, include a foreground element so that your reader can place where in the world your shot was taken.

Why would someone have a collection of cloud shots? What if you took a photo and the sky was blown out? Didn’t HDR or even think to. Take your shot, mask the blown out boring sky and insert a new one.

But isn’t that cheating? I’m a photography purist, and this is on the fence for me – but why shouldn’t you be allowed to enhance an image to make it look like you saw it when you clicked that shutter button? Other things to ‘collect’? How about landscapes, seascapes, letters and numbers, signs? These last suggestions are a bit different than collecting skies for use later, but collect what you like, you never know when you need an element added to your image that makes all the difference in the world.

GPS Synchronizing

I’ve recently been asked a little about GPS and Geotagging. Geotagging is the process of encoding the the location you took the photo (latitude and longitude) into each images’ EXIF data. Flickr, as well as a few others will use this information to place your image on a map.

So, you open one of the many tools out there to meld a GPS tracklog and JPEG image. The software takes location information the GPS (called a tracklog) and cross references each image against the time stamp in the track log and comes to a conclusion. But, have you thought that perhaps your Camera and GPS clocks are not exactly synchronized? Sure, you don’t need them perfect, but we would sure like to keep them as close as possible. Without GPS/Camera clock synchronization you could be encoding your images with location data that is minutes or even hours off! It all depends on how far the clocks in your devices are from each other.

There’s hope. If you don’t mind getting close you can make sure your clocks are set every time you start a photography session you intend to Geotag. Or, what I do is make sure I take a photograph of my GPS showing the time of day down to the second. At least all of the Geotagging programs I saw let me compensate for devices that are not perfectly synchronized. Open the image you took of the GPS clock, look at the image timestamp and do the math. Simple, done, and no fussing around complicated menus to set the clock on these devices each time you leave.

Some companies make a clip-on GPS unit with no display. They only record tracklogs (position and time, usually every so often) and can be retrieved via USB. While nice, they’re not much cheaper than a basic trail GPS with basic waypoint capabilities (no mapping). I say don’t worry about these unitaskers, get one with an LCD – who knows when you’ll want the GPS for hiking or other purposes?

-J

Flickr Collections & Sets

I’ve been having a few sleepless nights (Okay, maybe five minutes here, five minutes there) over a good, obvious and productive organization scheme for my flickr page. Every time I think I come up with a good way to break my photos up into collections and sets I grow to dislike the decision.

So far I have a few master collections, one for personal sets (fun shots), one for professional sets (paid clients) and one for travel. Inside those are breakdowns like food photography, experimental, light painting. Some go plenty deep – under Travel I have collections for each state, then another collection for each city and then sets for images I took in that city. Of course, I only list cities and states when I have images to put there.

I still haven’t found my zen of flickr organization, what do you do? Are your images in some sort of organization or pretty much tossed into a few loosely relevant sets? Leave a comment below and feel free to leave a URL to your flickr stream, especially if you have a tasty organization scheme we can stea, er, borrow.

Cook the Ambient

Last night I receive a call from my good friend Jenn and she says she needs a shot of her bike at night at an easily definable location. No problem, got time tonight? Sure.

Camera, 24-70mm and 10-22mm, Pocket Wizards, two flash units and my trusty voice activated light stand (Michelle) was over because we were going to go to the local camera club. On the way to the location I piece together the shot I want in my mind, what are my main challenges? Well it’s going to be dark so I need a flashlight to correctly focus on the subject. I’ll need to get low and possibly on the ground. I’ll also need to cook the ambient to balance flash with the lights in the background.

Well, at least I could do the last one. I forgot my trusty flashlight and I was still in my work clothes from earlier in the day. Thankfully we had cell phones that were bright enough to focus on and well, I might have ruined a set of pants laying on the asphalt.

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A weekend of cleaning, labeling and sorting. It’s hard to look at a table full of goodies and pick your favorites. What lenses do I want to take? Long, wide, specialty (Fisheye, Lensbaby, Pinhole)? Filters? ND, Grad ND, Polarizers. Bag? Standard, Slingback, Backpack, Holster? Cables and Chargers – one of each or be redundant? One body? Two or Three? Supports? Tripod, Monopod, GorillaPod? How many Bananas to bring for the GorillaPod?

What do you take to photograph Balloons?

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I don’t like to get my camera too wet. A few hundred thousand volts of lightning doesn’t tickle my fancy. Hail and Wind? Nah thanks. But damn, sometimes I risk it all for some lightning shots. A few weeks ago I was lucky. I have always heard photographic religious pondering about when its your time to take a shot, it will be presented to you. I believe this shot was ‘my time’.

Here I was, enjoying a calm Sunday afternoon and out of the blue the sky started getting dark and the wind started blowing. Ahhh great, yet another summer storm. We already had one the week before that took down a good 75-100′ tree. Literally picked it up, snapped it at the base and threw it 10′.

Lightning has got to be really spectacular for me to pick myself out of my chair (or hammock) and go in, grab my camera, tripod, cards, battery, lens and remote. Its just a pain. Towards the west was some really good lightning – so why not. Little do I know that I would have captured the image above.

I did get some good shots, nice clear bolts of cloud to ground strikes. I ventured further and further down the dock, taking shots along the way. If I were to get hit right now I hope once they pull the camera from my hands they can still recover an image or two. I made it to the end of the dock where a 25′ metal flagpole was the only thing taller than I was. I was exposing one shot when behind me I saw a strike right over the houses. It seems like the storm was now circling behind me. In one motion I turned around the tripod, composed my shot and started making exposures.

Lightning shots are best done at a stopped down aperture and at a few seconds shutter speed. A tripod is a must and a remote helps even more. I had the camera set at f/11 and 3.2 seconds. I stood there and hit my remote button.. Counted off three seconds. Shutter closed. Nothing hit. Again, three seconds. And again. On the fifth exposure there it was, a strike that made my heart skip a beat. I got it, I know I did. By then I came to my senses and realized that the wind was so strong I thought a quick burst could have knocked me over. I picked up the tripod, collapsed the legs and on the way up it started to rain, the wind whipping the drops in my face.

I get to the house and power was out. There goes actually seeing if I had gotten the shot. Well, I could tell what I had on the back of my camera, but how often have you seen something that looked great in camera that didn’t hold up on the screen? I patiently waited. Power was out for seven hours.

Since then, the photo has turned out to be a big hit in our neighborhood, online and amongst friends. Goes to show you – if you’re there and whatever religious figure decides to give you a show, you’ll capture it. This shot was pure luck. Besides knowing what to set the camera at and having the equipment to take the photo – this shot was 99.9% luck and I’m grateful for the opportunity to capture it.

You’ve got two eyes, don’t let that eye not looking through the viewfinder take a break. Use them both!

This is a technique I’ve been using for many years, and its surprising how few people I talk to have even tried it, or they may have tried it and not realized its power. Okay, I won’t lie – this is tougher to do if you are left-eyed but if I can do it left-eyed, so can you. The technique involves using your right eye to look through the viewfinder and the left eye to look to the left of the hot shoe mount and at the scene.
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