When we were last in Playa del Carmen for our honeymoon, I spent several evenings wandering the streets, taking pictures from every street corner in the oldest part of town, which also happens to be the center of the tourist area. As one of the fastest growing cities in the world, these street corners had changed a lot since my first visit to the town (most of the streets didn’t exist on my first visit!) and according to the photos and information we have since found online, this trend continues. This is one of the reasons I took these pictures, I wanted to chronicle the changes I knew were going to happen.
Stepping backwards a bit, when I purchased my first SLR almost two decades ago and began to learn photography, almost all sources were in agreement that every time you clicked the shutter, you should then immediately record on paper the shutter speed, aperture, and lens focal length in order that you could study the results later and learn from them. This was not something I was ever good at bothering to do. The modern digital camera records all that information for you in the EXIF data, and so I look forward to being able to learn from it when I get a new Digital SLR sometime in the next month or two. Even your basic digital point and shooters do this, though there isn’t much to learn since they weren’t values you had control over.
A couple of years ago I saw an article online about cameras that had GPS built into them, which then imprinted the latitude and longitude of the photo’s location into the EXIF data. They even including heading data, so that when you looked at all the locations on a map, they also indicated in which direction the picture was taken. When I had been taking my pictures in Playa del Carmen, I had been attempting to note down on paper where each of dozens of frames were taken. Needless to say, this solution would be a lot easier. However, I plan to choose my camera based on criteria related to photography; not the ability to tell me where I am.
Recently I’ve become aware of an alternative solution. While a hand held GPS normally has the ability to record where you have been, which can later be matched with the time stamps in the pictures’ EXIF data, these toys are expensive and somewhat useless to me as I am pretty good at knowing where I am without one. I’ve always been map orientated and highly aware of where I am and which way is north; so a hand held GPS would be of little benefit. Karin is the same way. But there is an alternative device known as a GPS logger. These are small devices that do not have a screen to read their current output, but instead they record your location for later download into a computer. They cost about $100 or less, and can be set to save your location at an interval, for example every 30 seconds; whenever you have moved a certain distance, such as 10 meters; or a combination of both. Generally they have enough memory to save between 35,000 and 100,000 data entries.
After your return home and upload both your photos and GPS log into your computer, there is then software that will look at the time stamp information in each photo’s EXIF data, find the corresponding GPS data for that time, and then update each photos’ add the GPS information into the photo’s EXIF data. When you upload such photos to Flickr or use Adobe Photoshop Elements on your computer, a map with each pictures location can then be viewed.
There is also the added benefit of having a complete log of your movements, which probably would make blogging about an outing a lot easier with a chronological map to consult. The only thing the loggers do not do is record a heading, but for the price it would make a lot more sense to bring one over wasting my vacation time trying to record where each frame is taken.
