[Az-Geocaching] New cacher and another reason to use GPS

[Jim Scotti]

   Photography and GPS are a wonderful combination.  There's a not very
active Yahoo!Group called Geographing which combines the two that might be
worth checking out.  I think some careful notetaking on when your photos were
taken that includes the GPS measured coordinates and a direction is a great
idea and one that is even easier with a digital camera.  If you keep your
digital camera's clock reasonably accurate, you can do a lot of back checking
using your tracklog for most of your photos - and you don't have to think
about it too much, just to leave your GPS on and tracking while your are
exploring and photographing.  Along with a couple of waypoints for special
photos and calibration, you should be able to reconstruct the location of
almost all your images, at least while the GPS is on and tracking satellites.  
I've done that with one hike, but haven't gone much farther with it - yet.
   As for what GPS, well, almost any will do.  I like my Garmin Legend whose
maps really help in a lot of circumstances (using MapSource Roads and Rec
and/or Topo is my prefered).  It's recent firmware upgrade that expanded the
number of waypoints and trackpoints really makes it wonderful to be able to
use both for keeping track of where your photos were taken (not to mention
for geocaching).  Its compass, however, depends on recent motion of the
reciever, so a reciever with a built in compass might be preferable if she
wants to include direction of photo a little more reliably.
   The biggest problem I've had in combining GPS and camera is just good old
organization and record keeping.  I'm still trying to find the best way of
organizing my digital pictures (the old notebook with slides or
transperancies worked pretty well, but with smaller numbers of images, it
wasn't hard to keep track of the images I wanted - I need some sort of
database scheme to keep track of my digital images....  Including more
information like location, time, direction, and other notes in such a
database should not be too hard to do.

Jim.

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, gale and mike wrote:

> A friend of mine sent me an e-mail recently. A coworker of his is a
> photography buff. She is interested in getting her own GPS to use with
> her photography. She does a lot of landscapes and nature photography and
> wants to be able to find places again. Is anyone out there a photographer
> and use their GPS like that? Any recommendations on what GPS she should
> get?

Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/