Photographer: Hallgrim Haug Halfilms
Skier: Howie Arnstad Howie

Aperture solves that, and so far I’m very happy about the 1.5 version.

And just the other day I was putting “figure out how to export lots of pictures from Aperture to FCP quick and easy” in my todo-list. Then comes “Aperture to Final Cut Pro” from Connected Flow. Check. Great work, Fraser! There’s a dead-easy manual online and the price is nice (read: Free).

Also check out the excellent Flickrexport for iPhoto and Aperture.

Screenshot: The latest creations in the Flickr Amazing Circles group

But now there are 1 002 members in the Amazing Circles Flickr group, and member number 1 000 is JJjunki from Tsukuba, Japan. Welcome! Here’s a circle JJjunki made.

The group now approcahes 10 000 Amazing Circles, with the most active members close to 200 circles each.

Also, a big applause for Nadano Kamome, who started this with the picture “How to edit Reversing world” in October 2005. I almost met Kamome in April 2006, when I visited Japan with my family. Almost, because we couldn’t find a spot and time where we both could be at the same time. I think we even passed each other on different trains between Kyoto and Kobe at some point! Next time, Kamome, I promise! I’m definitely going back to Japan, which was just brilliant. Remind me finishing my Japan series that I started (brilliantdays.com – tag “Japan”), but never finished.

If you do a Google search for “Amazing Circles”, you’ll get over 37 000 hits. That’s a quite a bit for a name I “invented” only 15 months ago. According to Trendmapper (Amazing Circles chart), it has been as high as about 95 000 hits back in May 2006. And when Digg caused a stampede in February 2006, the site went down. Heh.

Some people have gone bananas with pictures of themselves. So if you want to make some really scary new year’s cards…

I’ve been testing Aperture for some time, and it’s an amazing program. But I like iPhoto a lot too. There are many features in iPhoto that Aperture doesn’t have, and the other way. So I find it difficult to decide which one to use. If I could have one wish for Aperture and iPhoto: Use the same database and folder structure. I don’t care which one, where or how. Just use the same database.

So that everything I do in iPhoto (tagging, easy picture manipulation like removing red eyes, putting together some calenders and books), also shows up in Aperture.

And when I do advanced editing/correction/tagging in Aperture, it should immediately show up in iPhoto. And be available in all apps that tap into the media from the iApps, like Pages, iWeb, Keynote, Comic Life, Disc Cover etc.

One picture every third day for 20 years is about 2 000 pictures. 66 seconds in NTSC, about 80 in PAL. I’m looking forward to see the first one…

Matt explains at Digg how he did it:

I plugged the digital camera (power) in to the wall socket, placed the camera on some books on the dresser, and then used to some other books (always the same ones) to square the bottom books / camera up with the dresser so that it was always in the same position…it was actually a two person job. Because you are right, we ended up bumping it (no matter how careful we were) and needing to take the camera down because sometimes we’d know folks would be coming over and might see the camera set up (we hadn’t told folks at this point) and either figure out Carlin was pregnant.

We basically dedicated the camera to sit there for this project. I used my old SLR to take normal photos and later on the digital video camera we bought could also take decent stills.

Eirik did something similiar some time ago, just with the view outside his window.

Update A Digg user tells that this has been done before – in the 1998 short movie “7 seconds to Sophie” watch on Atom films), and even used in the beginning of the movie Amélie. Still: This is Matt’s wife and HIS daughter growing in there. What a lovely memory to keep.

Excellent. Just as I predicted in april 2005:

In a few years, most cameras and cameraphones could have small GPS units inside, that stores the exact location every picture is taken.

It’s nice when the future (for once) comes faster than predicted. Now, let’s have those flying cars, full meals in pills and holiday houses on the moon.

BTW, Eirik claims it was his idea.

Possibly not, but four years ago I travelled through Alsace in France with a digital camera and a Garmin GPS. After the trip I matched the time stamps in the GPS track with the time stamps of the images from my camera.

If you have an old-fashioned camera that doesn’t tag your photos, have a look at “Adding GPS data to your photos”.

And Sony: Pleeeeeease hire someone creative to name your products. The new GPS unit is called “GPS-CS1″. Hello? You make a unit to tag pictures with GPS and then name it the same as the previous version of the world’s most used app for editing the same photos; Adobe Photoshop, now in version CS2. Lame, lame, lame. You don’t have to name every single Sony product “three-letters dash two-letters-and-a-number”…

There’s also a Flickr user called Stunning Nikon on Flickr, that has all the ads as images (one of them – featuring Kate Moss – above).

If you want to check out likely candidates for the Nikon Stunning Gallery the next days, use Flickr’s own “Interesting” feature. See the pictures people have tagged for Nikon rated by how interesting they are. There are over 3 000 photos tagged as of today, and some of them of very high quality, even if some users seem to have tagged every photo they ever have taken…

Marketing

This is clever marketing by Nikon. The fact that I’m writing about it proof in itself. But the smartest thing about it is this: Right now hundreds, maybe thousands of photographers all over the world are looking through their photos thinking “Which one would be good enought for the Nikon Stunning Gallery site?” Or “Which photo in my stream is good enough?”

And when people see that excellent photographers like Mark Burdett, Nils K. Windisch and Roger (NJ Dodge) have “nikonstunninggallery” in their tags, they will click and find out what it is. “Hmmm… These guys are all using Nikons…”

There’s also a companion site called Stunningnikon.com, with some ads, (way) too much Flash and Kate showing some more skin with a beat to it.

BTW, here are the ones I have “dared” tagging for the gallery…

Andy Rosen posts awesome photos from his rock photographer era in London, 1976-1984. The above shot of Simon Le Bon is one of the over 60 great photos so far. Other include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Clash, Boy George, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and Malcolm Maclaren.

Overtime I will post the entire collection online. There is a mass of stuff. I’ve already discovered a fogotten 10 rolls of the Clash playing to 50 people and Billy Idol at Bob Geldofs 21st birthday bash both in swimming trunks. I also have a very rare collection of the characters at the Blitz Club, a very creative scene that followed punk, which was led by Steve Strange.

On his blog “Andy Rosen Punks”, he posts stories for some of the photos.

USA

Bert P. Krages has posted an article about your rights when taking pictures in the USA. There’s also a pdf file to print and put with your camera.

Also see Jim McGee’s article at Vividlight.com, with advice on what to do.

And Kantor.com, with a “…synopsis of where you’re allowed to shoot and when you’re allowed to publish what you take.”

Not about photography, but being pulled over, searched or arrested – see this 45 minutes long video on Google on how to behave when in contact with the police.

The first segment is about being pulled over for speeding, but teaches some good principles.

Then at about 22 minutes, about how to behave if the police just stop you on the street. Probably the most useful part for photographers.

The last part deals with house searches etc.

If you just want the conclusion, fast forward to 42:20 and learn the “three most important lines you may ever have to deliver in your entire life”. Heh…

UK

Linda Macpherson at Heriot Watt University has posted a similar one for UK at Sirimo.co.uk.

Australia

Andrew Nemeth has a long article about Australian laws at 4020.net. He also has links to some other countries’ laws, and cases where photographers were taken to court.

Your country?

If you have link to the laws in your country, feel free to use the comments below and I’ll update this article.

Books on photography and law

Now, what if there was an easy way to do what Eirik has done?

EXIF to the rescue
As you may know, EXIF is the standard used to store camera data in every digital photo. EXIF makes it possible for programs like iPhoto to tell you that this picture was taken April 2nd, 2005, with a Canon Powershot S50, aperture 5.6 and so on. The EXIF standard has a tag for GPS data, and there’s even a proposal to make a more “human” location data tag in EXIF, like “At Aunt Mary’s cabin, Nordfjord, Norway”.

Superb camera site dpreview has a good page about EXIF. Sites like Flickr reads the EXIF data, and displays it when you look at pictures, like this one I took last year. Flickr will display the correct date I took the picture, even if I didn’t upload it until later.

Jeffrey Early has made a Mac OSX application that let’s you put GPS data in pictures EXIF data. Add a comment if you know any Windows or Linux programs that does the same. Jeffrey writes that “Apple has confirmed that MacOS 10.4 will support the GPS metadata tags in photos. This will open up a whole realm of opportunities for users and developers to take advantage of the position data on photos.” Excellent! I couldn’t find on the 200+ New features page for Tiger at Apple, but it’s probably there.

Jeffrey also made a photo album with maps, to show an example how to combine photos and GPS data.

A GPS in every camera and cameraphone
In a few years, most cameras and cameraphones could have small GPS units inside, that stores the exact location every picture is taken. But already now Flickr should add maps, especially now that Yahoo has bought Flickr. So when I add GPS data to my pictures before uploading them to Flickr, I could have a small map next to the picture. Clicking this will list every other picture at Flickr taken at the same spot, or within 50 meters, 500 meters, 5 kms etc.

I blogged yesterday about Gary Turner’s GPS/Flickr/Mobile wish. With Yahoo and all the data already in Yahoo maps, and GPS already in the EXIF standard, why wait until 2015? Why not this friday?

Just a little wish to Yahoo maps and Google maps all others making übercool maps on the web: The world. Not just the US. Every street in Europe, Asia and Australia is already in a database somewhere. I want to make my own “Google sightseeing” of the neighbourhood.

Update As of 1st of August 2006, Sony has launched cameras with a GPS unity connected to them. More about it here.