Click each image for a larger view.

Spring is upon us and I am badly craving some outdoor excursions and landscape shooting. Largely as a result of convenience, I’ve been doing a lot more portraits lately, but I also really love landscapes. Click the photo above for a larger view.

This week’s photo is another from the trip I took with my brother last fall to Moab. I WOULD have posted one of mine, but I wasn’t able to get any of the lightning. Why didn’t I get lightning? I click the shutter two seconds too late. Yeah, it sucked.

The trick to this shot (without a $300 lightning trigger) is to shoot in relatively low light, which we had at sunset. We were also lucky enough to have a pretty great lighting/thunder storm in the distance, just above the mesas, while we were bone dry. With the low light, we were able to close down the lens and leave the shutter open for quite a while, around 30 seconds. The trick was to have it open while lightning struck.

We were shooting pretty much in tandem – he just started one frame 5 seconds later than I did. So, my shutter closed and about 2 seconds later I saw the lightning bolt. Three seconds after that, my brother’s shutter closed. In those type of situations, one considers tossing the other person’s rig over the 1000 foot drop-off. Luckily, I restrained myself and this great photo resulted.

Click here to see the photo at Flickr.

My brother’s birthday is this week (Happy Birthday Bro!) and I’ve been thinking about a good gift to get him. He’s a great photographer in many areas, including portrait and architecture. Some of his best work, though, is in landscape (the photo at the top of the post is his – you can click it for a larger view). I’d like to get him something for that in particular.

As I’ve given it thought, the following are the top 5 things I considered getting him and 5 great tools for the landscape photographer (in fact, a lot of these would be great for any photographer). Mmmmm… gear.

Hoodman HoudeLoupe

At around $70 this is one of the most cost effective gifts. It allows the outdoor photographer to more effectively see his camera’s LCD screen in the bright sun. I have one of these and love it.

You can check it out at Hoodman’s site here.

Gitzo Traveler Tripod

A good tripod is the cornerstone of landscape photography. If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that I LOVE Gitzo tripods. Their build quality, great locks and overall cool look make them the best in the industry. The Traveler version is perfect when carrying it out in the field. It folds up to a ridiculously short 14″ and weighs in at only 2.2 lbs (for our metric readers, that is 35.5 cm and 1 kg). This one can get a bit pricey, though, with a price of $640 on B&H Photo. If you’re going this far, you might as well get their titanium version (it’s only $2,500).

Hmmm… maybe I’ll give my brother my Gitzo tripod and get this one for myself…

Check out the Gitzo site here for more.

Epson P-3000

When shooting in the field there never seems to be enough memory cards and the LCDs are never large enough. The P-3000 by Epson aims to help both problems. When a card is full you can plug the card into this small device and download the pictures onto its 40 GB drive. You can then view them on a crisp, bright 4″ display. It accepts a wide variety of card types and can view most popular camera raw files.

It comes in at around $400 and can be found on Epson’s web site (which has a few nice mail in rebates for a few months, knocking the price down to $300).

Garmin eTrex Legend HCx

I love geotagging my photos. If you haven’t tried it, you should. In brief, GeoTagging is a method that allows you to capture the location you took the photo at and store it in the photo’s metadata. You can then display the photo on a map using Flickr, Google, etc.

The Garmin eTrex is a small, handheld GPS unit that allows you to capture the location that you later synch up to your photos.

GeoTagging brings landscape (and travel) photography to a whole new level.

You can check out Garmin’s GPS units at their site. The eTrex Legend (which I have) is around $230. Make sure to get the HCx version. It has the better sensor, which allows you to get readings when under tree cover, in valleys, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about GeoTagging, you can check out some of my previous posts on the subject here, here, here, and here.

Photoshop CS3

Panoramas are cool. They can depict a landscape in a vert unique way. They can, however, sometimes be a bit of a pain to stitch together. Well, that isn’t the case any longer for anyone with Adobe Photoshop CS3. Besides being the industry standard for serious photography, this most recent version does an AMAZING job automatically stitching together a series of shots meant for a panorama. You have to see it to believe it.

You can pick up a copy of Photoshop for about $649 and can learn more at Adobe’s web site here.

Click the picture for a larger view.

White Rim, Canyonlands

Canon Rebel XT, 2.8 24-70L at 24mm,
f9, 1/250 sec

Rough work, eh?

Click for a larger view.

Specs for This Photo

Rebel XTi, 18-55 mm lens at 18mm, f8, 1/2 sec, 100 ISO.

Last night, as I was browsing the web, I came across GPicSync, a tool that trumps them all! It uses ExifTool in the background, but does EXACTLY what I was looking for. It tags photos with GPS data that I was looking for, automatically. It looks at the time stamps of the GPX file (a common GPS format) and the camera file and automatically tags it if they are within a certain number of seconds of each other (specified by the user). It works on Windows Vista and best of all, it’s free!

You can download GPicSync here. After installing, it gives you the option to choose the folder full of images you want to synch and the appropriate GPX file. You can also change how close the two timestamps need to be in seconds and a few others settings. Output options include putting the data in the EXIF headers, the EXIF Headers and the IPTC Comments, and creating a Google Earth file. The interface is very simple and the product works very well.

GPicSync Screenshot

A special thanks to the Adobe Lightroom Journal, which provided the link to this wonderful resource.

Flickr and Google Maps (using Picasa) are the two most popular, free, public tools available for automatically mapping geotagged photos. I tagged a photo from a recent trip to Moab, Utah and uploaded it to both sites. The rest of this posts outlines my findings (from a ‘new’ user’s standpoint) on how each worked.

PicasaWeb – Google Maps (Click for larger view)

Flickr – Yahoo Maps (Click for larger view)

The following are the items I compared during the evaluation and which I preferred.

PicasaWeb – Google Maps

Click here to view my mapped photo in PicasaWeb.

From a beginner’s standpoint, PicasaWeb was much easier to use. It’s interface (and lack of features) makes it more approachable and mapping is much more simple. It also displayed a thumbnail of the photo directly on the map and displayed a small preview of it when the thumbnail was clicked. To top it all off, you can easily click on and view the location in Google Earth, which allows you to view the scenery all over again – very cool!

Unexpectadely, PicasaWeb did a poorer job of accurately placing the photo. The displayed coordinates didn’t match those tagged to the photo. They were close (within a few hundred yards), but as this is powered by GoogleMaps (the best mapping tool on the web, in my opinion), I was disappointed that it wasn’t 100% accurate. Disclaimer: I didn’t spend much time trying to troubleshoot to see why it didn’t read it properly – I was trying to see how well it worked without fiddling around.

Flickr – Yahoo Maps

Click here to view my mapped photo in Flickr.

Unlike PicasaWeb, Flickr’s mapping accuracy was spot on. It also provides MANY more features than PicasaWeb for organizing and sharing the photos outside the map, which is appealing to many. Flickr is the industry standard for photo sharing, which makes this option fairly attractive. I also liked the feature that allows you to e-mail your organized sets to others directly. You can always copy/paste the link, but this removes one additional step, especially for new users.

Flickr’s dispaly of the photos on the map was one of its major downfalls. While PicasaWeb displays a nice thumbnail and preview when clicked, Flickr decided to implement a small dot to indicate the presence of the picture. When the dot is clicked, a small preview of the photo is shown in the bottom left corner of the map, far away from the dot. I found that fairly inconvenient.

Which I Will Use

The comparison chart above makes the comparison look fairly equal, and honestly, it was pretty close.

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to share your geotagged photos and don’t have much use for other features, I would recommend PicasaWeb. It was easier to use and displays the photos on the map in a more appealing way.

If you are looking for more features to manage your photos in other ways, though, Flickr is the industry standard. It provides many more features and a much larger community of photos.

As GeoTagging is only part of my photo sharing/management, I chose Flickr. For more specific on how to upload and display images, you can visit their sites directly at Flickr or PicasaWeb.

[Update after original posting: I recently found a new tool that uses EXIFTOOL in the background but trumps this one! Check it out here.] Not sure what GeoTagging is? Not sure why I chose to run you through the steps of ExifTool? Check out my other, more general post/review, right here.

With that said, let’s jump into ExifTool. Now, to start off, this is meant to be primarily a command prompt tool, which means right out of the box it doesn’t have a pretty interface. Please don’t let that scare you, though! If you use the steps in this post you will be able to use this free tool to geotag your photos!

There arethree basic ways you can use ExifTool to tag your photos.

1. The GUI Way (I just found this and it does provide some pretty buttons! – definately try this way first). It is by far the easiest and fastest. If you only need the lat/long/altitude information, this is gold.
2. The kinda easy way: Just in case the GUI way doesn’t work.
3. The harder way, which lets you attach lots more GPS info to your photo. This uses the program directly from command prompt. If you need your photos tagged with more GPS information, you should probably read about the harder way.

[*Geek Note - GUI stands for Graphical User Interface - the pretty parts of programs that let you click buttons, view nice text boxes, etc.]

The GUI Way (what you are probably used to) TRY THIS WAY FIRST

1. Download the ExifTool .zip from this site and unzip the .exe file to your desktop or other location on your computer. Rename it to exiftool.exe. It was previously named ExifTool(-k).exe.
2. Download the ExifTool GUI from this site and unzip the .exe file to the same location that you just placed the ExifTool.exe at.
3. As long as they are in the same directory, you can double-click on the ExifToolGUI icon to run the program. It is fairly easy to use.
   1. Locate the folder that contains the images you want to apply the GPS data to.
   2. Select the image(s) you want to affect.
   3. Make sure the EXIF button on the right side is selected.
   4. Click one of the ^ buttons next to the word Edit. Click the GPS tab and fill in your data. It has a check box for North and East. If it is South or West, simply leave the appropriate box unchecked (for example, if your coordinate is North, leave the South box unchecked). Click the Save button.

A Few Things to Note:

• You can make a few basic configurations in the Options menu at the top.
• Just a reminder that the site states that this is not a commercial product and that you should use at your own risk… other disclaimers that remove liability from anyone else if your photos blow up. It worked for me – try it on some copies of your photos initially. Once they work, you can probably feel fairly comfortable using it.
• The GPS fields are pretty limited using this option.

The kinda easy way

I like this way because it also lets me quickly select specific images and tag them. In many cases I might just want, say the first 10 images, when I knew they were at a particular location. I can then drag and drop just those without have to put them in their own folder or running the script on them one at a time (which is what is required in the harder way).

1. Download the ExifTool .zip from this site and unzip the .exe file to your desktop or other location on your computer.
2. Rename the executable as described below.
   • You’ll rename the executable to contain the GPS information you want to apply to a particular set of photos. Then, when you want to tag a different set of photos, you can rename it again.
   • It should be named in this general manner: exiftool (-GPSLongitudeRef=[W/E] -GPSLongitude=[longitude coordinate]…).exe  [my note - you may not have to actually type the .exe part. If you didn't see it there when you started renaming, you can probably leave it out]. You should fill in the W/E and longitude coordinates with the specific information that you manually read from the GPS waypoints you recorded during your photo shoot.
   • A specific example is as follows: The only spaces are those between exiftool and the first ( and the space just prior to the new set of information, like between the W and -GPSLongitude. It labels my photos with the coordinates, altitude and timestamp that the coordinates were recorded at.
     • exiftool (-GPSLongitudeRef=W -GPSLongitude=104,54.3101 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLatitude=39,33.5368 -GPSAltitude=1796m).exe
   • For full documentation on the available GPS tags, you can check out this page.
3. Drag/drop the file(s) or directory that contains the files you want to tag with a particular set of information. (See, I told you it would be pretty easy).

A Few Things to Note:

• This will erase any pre-existing GPS related information on the photo (all other metadata is left the same).
• You have to avoid using several characters in this as they are not allowed in Windows file names. They are
  /\?*:|”<>. That is why we had to avoid a timestamp in this method (which would have involved both a : and a /).
• This process copies the originals of your photos and puts an _original at the end, giving you a set of duplicate file names. You can avoid this by adding -overwrite_original just prior to the last parentheses. Note that this is at your own risk as it can sometimes cause file corruption.

Now, the Harder Way

If you’ve lasted this long, you’re ready for the hard stuff. It is in command line, which isn’t too bad, if you’ve seen it before. If you haven’t, well, proceed at your own risk.

1. Download the ExifTool .zip from this site and unzip the .exe file to your desktop or other location on your computer. Rename it to exiftool.exe. It was previously named ExifTool(-k).exe.
2. To pull up command prompt, click the Start button at the bottom left of your screen and choose run. Type command and you will see a black box pop up.
3. You’ll need to run the program through this and pass it some parameters. You’ll need to modify it a bit for your own situation. You’ll need to use different lat/long/alt coordinates. You’ll also need to point to a different folder where your pictures are stored. You should point to a different directory for the exiftool.exe (you should point that first part to wherever you saved it at). As this isn’t a full tutorial on command line use, I pasted all the information I typed into it in step 4. Don’t forget, replace the applicable information with yours.
4. C:\Users\Brian\Desktop\exiftool -GPSLongitude=104,54.3101 -GPSLon
   gitudeRef=W -GPSLatitude=39,33.5368 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSAltitude=”1963.00 m” -
   GPSDateStamp=2008:01:10 -GPSTimeStamp=”3:50:01 PM” “B:\My Pictures\Reyman\2008\2
   008_01_GPSTest”

A Few Things to Note:

• If you are into doing this via the command line, you should definately check out all the documentation on the tool, at the original site for downloading/documentation, here.