Interlude – Technical Procedures

Some of you are wondering why it takes so long to post all the entries and photos every day.
Others are wondering what my daily technical procedures are like.

So here it is the long boring technical details of what I do:

I am shooting with a Pentax K-5 Digital Camera that is 16.7 Megapixel with a battery grip (so I have two batteries in the camera).  I am only shooting in Camera Raw mode and that fits about 460 pictures on a 16GB card – I am also carrying with me a spare 8GB card.  If I go over 700 pictures in a day – we have trouble.

I carry with me at all times a 10-20mm and an 18-200mm lens.  For the most part its the 18-200mm lens but I switch on occasion to the 10-20.  I also have a 70-300mm Macro lens but I only use that for studio work (which has only been one day so far).  While I have a tripod and light with me I don’t carry them around daily and I have only used my onboard flash one time (you haven’t seen that picture yet).

In m pocket I am carrying a Gisteq CD111 geologger that tracks where I am every 5 seconds.  Its a great little device but VERY hard to use.  If you hit the wrong button it can be pretty loud or even turn itself off.  It was only $80 which was great but its also tricky to download the data from and wipe the data off of.  Once you know what to do it is easy but it took a lot of trial and error.  There are many geologgers on the market – what’s nice is that this doesn’t just capture a data point when I take a picture but constantly.

Every night I charge the 2 batteries and my geologger – I have a third battery with me for the camera but I have not had the need for it yet.  Since I don’t use the flash I can shoot hundred on the 2 batteries without a problem.

I also have my iPhone with me and I do occasionally grab a picture with it (its in my hand and I don’t always bring the camera to dinner).

Each night I copy all of the DNG (Camera Raw Digital Negative) files off my my memory card and onto my computer – I also download all of the images I took on my iPhone.

I use a program called Jet Photo Studio for organizing and geologging.  I create a new album for each day and copy all of the images into the album.  Jet Photo Studio will import the DNG files (and store them) but also make high quality JPG images from them as well (this can take a long time).

With all of my images for the day in an album I download the data from the Gisteq.  After I download the data I set the correct time-zone for the data and export a GPX file of the data (as a backup) – I then wipe the Gisteq for the next day.

Using Google Earth I open the data for the day and take a screenshot of the path I took for the album.

I then use Jet Photo Studio to geo-tag all of the images in the album.  If I am indoors sometimes the images don’t get tagged and while I can manually fix it – I am not concerned about it right now.

Since I am giving my photos to Bilge and Paul (I just give them JPG files and keep the DNG if they need it later) I want to make sure that the geo data is actually IN the files and not just in the album so I have Jet Photo Studio write the Latitude – Longitude and Altitude into the original JPG and RAW files (this takes a while).

Then I backup the Album to the 2 external hard drives I brought (my notebook can’t hold all the data).

For the website I go through and pick the images I like best – since these are not final prints I just grab the JPG files and I crop and resize each one to either 800×600 or 600×600 sometimes color correction but rarely rotating.

I then upload the images, describe them and write my blog entry.

Now do you see why I am a few days behind?

Photo Tallies to Date:

Day 0: 7
Day 1: 102
Day 2: 361
Day 3: 473
Day 4: 278
Day 5: 563
Day 6: 88
Day 7: 4
Day 8: 202
Day 9: 558

2,636 pictures (83GB) in the first 9 days!

Some images need more post production than just Photoshop so I have PTGUI for the panoramas, Pano2VR and Object2VR for the VR images and PhotoMatix Pro for my HDR work.

Now aren’t you glad u asked?