I’ve got tons of pictures to share. Some are already on my flickr page. I promise to update this site soon. I’ve made some videos of the trips as well. I’ll publish some of the content, even though it’s kinda outdated.

I probably will be posting a lot more when I get to the US, so stay tuned.

One other reason that I haven’t updated more frequently is that I was thinking of a more practical way of updating the pictures session. The way it is done now is extremely manual. I couldn’t find an apropriate wordpress plugin to work with and I didn’t have the time (or the brains for that matter) to tweak on a code that Otávio sent me.

I was also involved with a side-project at Rabbit Tell. Still can’t say much about it, but it’s pretty cool.

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Today I was surfing around and found Carlos Cazalis’ website. He is a mexican photographer that lives in São Paulo. At first, since the portfolio link was broken (lesson #1: allways upload finished content or don’t upload at all), I didn’t expect very much. But when I got to the essays part, I was astonished. This guy can really photograph and is very good with portraits and expressions.

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Some expensive pro cameras already have a built-in geotagging device. But the advanced amateur solution nowadays is to use specific geotagging equipment, such as the Sony GPS-CS1 (sold for US$ 150) or the ATP PhotoFinder. What they do is sync your geographical locaition with the time the photos where taken. Obviously, for this to work, both camera and GPS have to be time synced and you have to be with the device when you take the pictures. You just plug the device in your PC, insert the memory card and the machine does the rest of the work.

There is also the manual way. You remember where the picture was taken, find the spot in Google Earth or Maps and insert the coordinates in the EXIF. I does help people who see the pictures locate themselves geographically, but that’s not all what geotagging is about. Advanced amateurs and pros sometimes simply get their car or hop on a bus to go to places just to find out new stuff to photograph (I know I love to do that) and after taking hundreds of pics, it’s almost impossible to remember all the places you’ve been to.

For those who want to share geotagged images, Panoramio is a way out. Here’s a useful list of geotagging websites and software. For those that use Picasa, here’s a nice tutorial.

It seem quite obvious that in a very near future all consumer cameras will have GPS geotagging devices and map and satellite services will be swarmed with pictures. Soon we’ll have internet enabled cameras with auto-upload and geotagging, so it’ll be cool to see stupid criminals unintentionally uploading pictures that pinpoint their homes. On the other hand, a lost camera might become a treasure map in wrong hands.

For those who like hacking equipment, this guy made a Nikon D200 geotagging hack with cheap parts. I don’t have the expertise to build such a machine, but acording to forums, it seems to work fine.

Geotagging is not exclusive for photography. Though I think its not available for videos yet (it would be cool to have geotagged paths of video shots), geoblogging is also an option. More at geobloggers.com.

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Last Wednesday there was a lunar eclipse. Here in the south of Brazil, the moon was completely hidden around midnight.

I snapped this shot from my apartment balcony at 11:18, before the eclipse was total. I used a 500mm mirrored Tokina lens, with fixed f/8, speed 1/160 and ISO 200. My Nikon D70 was mounted on a tripod. No cropping and no Photoshop used - except for resizing and recompressing.

I wanted to get a clear shot of Saturn, that was made visible by the eclipse, so I took some long exposures (which I promise to publish soon), leaving the moon one big ball of light. When the eclipse was complete, its easier to see the other elements in the sky. I thought of maybe overlaying both pics in Photoshop to get a clearer view of every thing.

Sorry for not posting more of the eclipse photos, but I wanted to start writing right away and not delay this blog any longer. Promise I’ll post them as soon as I get back home in Porto Alegre.

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