Wasted Continuum

I blacked out my emblem and badge on my GTI. After I blacked out my tail lights in March, I really wanted to make the rest black. I used Plasti Dip for the job. It worked great.

Blacked Out GTI

I have been using Lightroom 4 since the first day they released it in beta. One of the features I was excited about was the new Map module. I am fairly meticulous about organizing and tagging all my photos. This is a major reason why I love Lightroom. It excels at that. The thing that I have had to do manually (since both my Canon 5D2 and Canon S95 don’t have GPS logging) is geotag my photos when I upload them to Flickr. It is tedious and at times very difficult when I can’t remember the exact spot I was at when I shot the photo.

Since Lightroom 4 has made it easier to geotag your photos, I decided to give it a try. In order to make this work, I had to find a way to track and import my GPS data for my photos. I should note that Lightroom only supports GPX files. After trying a bunch of GPS tracking apps on my phone and testing a bunch of desktop that exported to GPX when it was necessary, I was disappointed that most of the software out there did not work well with Lightroom. The last app I tried was My Tracks by Google. I forgot that they made one. I wish I tried it first because it works perfectly with Lightroom.

I tested it out yesterday when I was shooting along the Mississippi River. There is only one thing to remember before you start using My Tracks. You should make sure your phone has an accurate reading from your GPS signal. Acquiring your location takes time if it’s a cold start. I turned on my GPS a few minutes before I got to my destination to give my phone plenty of time to lock onto my location. After My Tracks has a good read on you, just start recording and then begin taking photos. One last thing to be aware of, you should check to see if your camera’s time is set correctly. Lightroom syncs your photos to the GPS data with that time. You can correct this by setting a time offset after you imported everything, but you’ll save yourself a possible headache if you just check the time beforehand. After everything your GPS data and your photos are in Lightroom, it can sync them up with a few clicks. It saves the location data into your photos as metadata so when you upload them to Flickr, Flickr will recognize and map them for you. You can check out the photos that I tested it with on my Flickr.

If you have any questions about this whole process, leave a comment below or you can ask me at @JavaJunky.

This was taken outside of Salut in Saint Paul. I was there to celebrate my mom’s birthday. There are more photos on my Flickr.

I took this photo earlier this month after dropping my friend off at the airport. The sun was just rising and the whole park was foggy. This little flower caught my eye. There are a few more photos from this morning on my Flickr.

Last week, I decided to process some photos that I took a few months back at Como Zoo. They were taken with my Canon 5D using a 24-105mm. When I first looked through the photos, I was disappointed that a lot of them were flat, lacking contrast. I was not surprised by this being that a lot of the shots were taken indoors with low florescent lighting. Instead of not publishing these shots or even just publishing boring photos, I decided to take this opportunity to push Lightroom a little further than I usually do.

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Something exciting happened to me this week. I had one of my photos used in a Men’s Health article. Wednesday morning, I was contacted by someone in the creative department to use one of my photos from my Flickr stream. I have been contacted before by various sites about using my photos before, but never by a national publication like Men’s Health. By Wednesday afternoon, the article was up and my photo was included with my name right next to the byline. This morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise. I was emailed again. This time I was told to check out the front page of www.menshealth.com. I was a little shocked when I saw that the article my photo is featured in was the top story. So for the whole morning of June 17th, 2010, my face was plastered front and center on the homepage of the Men’s Health website. It was kind of surreal. It may not be as big of a deal as I make it out to be, but to me, it means a lot. I am a self-taught photographer and I have worked really hard over the years to improve myself skills and knowledge in it. Having one of my photos published by major magazine like Men’s Health in a way validates my work and efforts. Whatever it means, it did make for a good week for me.

View the full screenshot from this morning