… Or how I traded wits with the Nigerian Mafia.

Unused, Unsold and Unwanted

In the past, I have disposed of my used equipment on eBay. Writing the perfect sales copy, creating images and positioning myself against other sellers in the hope to fetch a fair price took too much of my valuable time, hence I didn’t bother going through the motions and left much of my equipment unused, unsold and unwanted.

I found a better way to back up my photographs in the field.

Since laptops are too heavy to carry around all day, I used to rely on image tanks for backup outdoors. That strategy works very well for me, but it did lack the capability of viewing images. That is where expensive image tanks with RAW viewer such as the Epson P6000 come in. Since the P6000 costs about $600 at the time of this writing and this photographer is always looking for better deals, I never bought one.

I ended up carrying my laptop on many trips so that I could connect to the internet and manage my websites. Outside, I simply swapped flash memory cards and back in the hotel room, I ran backups to my laptop and my image tank. I carry the image tank into the field, in case I run out of memory.

Learn how we will appreciate photos in the future.

How I got into HiperSpace and how it looks there.

Update :

I got the pictures from San Diego and since their display is still a bit larger, I decided to update this article.

Hector send me a nice email. It turns out that the photographer had screwed up and forgot to notify Hector, so it wasn't his fault.

So here is how my San Francisco Panorama looks on the Hiperspace Display:

This is how I should display all my Panoramas.

Joby flamboyantly markets the Gorillapod SLR Zoom to “serious photographers”.  Will it hold up to the promise of freeing us from our tripods or is it just another useless gadget cluttering our bag?

Let me give you the answer right now. The Gorillapod SLR Zoom is not stiff enough and therefore, sags a bit, making very long exposures difficult, if not impossible.

…are the best value for your money.

The 190XPROB Tripod legs together with any Bogen Manfrotto Tripod Head are an affordable, versatile and easy to use combination. It is my tripod of choice for all my needs.

I like this Tripod so much, that we upgraded Dani to the same one for our last Christmas trip. It makes a big difference to have a professional tripod that just works the way you would expect it to.

Learn what you need to know about Tripods.

Here is me posing with tripods and below are the tripod articles.

• Review of Tripod Heads
• My Tripod Legs
• Gorillapod

Learn how to avoid data loss and how to shop smart.

Nothing can be more frustrating than losing pictures due to memory card problems. I shot some nice pictures at the end of a strenuous hike to a waterfall. As Murphy wants it, those images were lost, not the ones easier to take again.

As a semiconductor professional, I have some insight into Flash technology. Some of it translates into easy to follow guidelines to avoid data corruption. I put technical background information in italics, making it easier for you to skip over these sections.

Geotagging

Through geotagging, you can put spatial information in your pictures, making it easy to find out where you took a particular photograph. The exact GPS coordinates are impressed into the EXIF image data. You can then put your photographs on a map and share it.

My Dad used to travel a lot when he was younger. He was a service technician and he got around. He infected me with the travel bug. I still love to listen to his tales of foreign places. Years take their toll on memories, and sometimes my Dad cannot remember where he took a photo anymore. (I also bought him a slide scanner to prevent his pictures from fading away.)

How different is our world by comparison? We take digital photographs whose color will never fade and now we can even geo-tag them, so that we may never forget where we took a photo. Years later, we can go back to precisely the same spot and see what changed. We can share special places with others or simply promote our photography (Panoramio, Flickr).

The prices for GPS receivers have eroded. Even my iPhone has one already built in. It takes photographs and automatically attaches GPS data. Jobo and other accessory makers have developed GPS receivers that record a location every time you press the shutter release button on your camera, allowing you to combine them later on your PC. For several years, I used to carry a small Garmin GPS, recording track logs and using programs like JetPhoto Studio, Google gpicsync or Microsoft Location Stamper to put the GPS data into my digital files. Geotagging is now a mainstream technology and is more popular than ever.

However, new technologies always bear dangers of exploitation.