ElectroSizzle.com » Photography

Feeling like the Big Fish in a Little Pond?

TheSizzle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:37:30 +0000

Check out this link to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive and get a little perspective. Please. Do it for the rest of us.

P.S. I’m a big fan of the photos with the word “Nebula” in the title.

Geo-Tagged Photos from Ireland

TheSizzle — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:16:02 +0000

I had the opportunity to take a trip last year which covered the better part of Ireland. While there, we had two cameras: a Nikon D70 DSLR and a Sony DSC-N2. More importantly though, I had a Sony GPS-CS1 geologger. This little device locks onto GPS signals and records your location every 15 seconds in standard NMEA format to internal flash memory. If you take the time to synchronize the internal clocks in your camera to GPS before you go shooting, afterwards you can correlate the time stamps in your photos with the position recorded by the device. I use software by RoboGeo to do this, although Sony includes some basic software with the device.

The GPS latitude, longitude, and altitude gets written into the image’s EXIF data and can be used to display the photo on a google map. The XML Google Maps plugin for WordPress can be used with the NextGEN Gallery plugin to do this. I’ve uploaded just a couple of the over 800 photos we took on the trip, all of which are tagged with their locations. The few that are shown here were taken at Connor Pass on the way to Dingle, on the west coast of Ireland. Also a few are of the coast itself. It’s pretty cool to see the jagged coastline from above in the google map and then see the first-hand photographs.

A feature I think would be useful in the XML Google Maps plugin, and I’m not sure the best way to do this, would be a way to highlight spots on the map where photos are closely bunched together and may not be totally obvious. For instance, there are three photos closely bunched inland near Connor Pass which you can’t clearly distinguish without zooming in the map. Maybe a small bubble with the number of photos hidden beneath the top photo? All in all though, it’s a really sweet plugin. I thought the google maps plugin for Gallery 2 was cool, but this works flawlessly.

I think I should also mention that there are other ways of recording your GPS location without using sony’s little gadget. I only mention this because the GPS-CS1 tends to lose track pretty often, and if you want accurate locations, you have to hold it away from you to get a good track again before you snap a photo. Basically, any handheld GPS device that can record waypoints would work just as well. There are also more expensive systems that attach directly to Nikon and Canon high end digital cameras and talk directly to the camera to tag the photos. But hey, I’m just a grad student. I can’t afford that stuff, so the GPS-CS1 worked just fine.

The NextGEN plugin creates this nice list of photos:

while the XML Google Maps plugin uses the NextGEN gallery to create this sweet google map. Click on the photos in the map to see descriptions, and be sure to zoom around and make use of all the features google maps have to offer!

2008 Dayton Air Show

TheSizzle — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:15:32 +0000

This past weekend, I took a trip to Dayton, Ohio for the annual airshow held at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The main draw this year was the demonstration of the F-22 Raptor. The speed and agility displayed by this plane was really special even though the pilot wasn’t allowed to show its full capabilities. Aside from the F-22, there were many other interesting planes and helicopters on display, including the C-17, C-130, P-3, Apache Longbow, A-10, Huey, CH-47, V-22, F-16, and many more. While oogling at all the technology (some of it new, some of it really really old), I managed to take a few photos which I’ve included here in abridged form.

Edit: Somehow I missed the emergency landing in the middle of the show? The plane must have (and should have) landed on a runway far from spectators because I certainly didn’t see it.

NextGEN Gallery WP Plugin

TheSizzle — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:59:22 +0000

I can never leave well enough alone, so I started playing with the NextGEN Gallery WP Plugin today to spice things up. It has a fantastic administrative backend to create galleries of images and then albums of galleries, all of which can be easily inserted into posts using a small tag. While customizing this plugin, I stumbled upon the Highslide JS project which can be integrated into NextGEN, after some serious finagling, to enable cool effects when displaying your images. These effects include image navigation, fading, being able to drag images around, etc. The WP-Highslide plugin is a good place to start messing around. This plugin integrates a part of the Highslide JS codebase into WP as well as supplying a good place to locate all of the Highslide-specific CSS. Don’t ask me to explain how it works, as it took me a few hours of code and CSS editing to get something usable. If you don’t hate yourself, the NextGEN gallery plugin works perfectly fine without it. However, your images won’t do such cool things when you click on them as mine do. Here is an example of displaying a small gallery (caricatures of a few friends in the spirit of South Park). When you click on a photo to enlarge it, try dragging it around and then maybe clicking on another one and dragging it around. It’s oddly entertaining.