I got an email the other day from a N82 user and professional artist Marc Dalessio showing off ways he uses his N82 to help him record his work. I love getting emails like this especially when I see how much the N82 draws in the extra creative people of the world. Using geotagging and time lapse photography (as talked about earlier at this blog), Marc is able to keep track of where he paints and show off his painting process in a short video.
Marc said,As a landscape painter I need to remember where I go painting, and can also pass the locations onto other painters, so I set up a flickr page with the best spots around Tuscany. Find link here.
I've also started doing time lapse movies of my portrait commissions, as before I had to remember to take the picture, now the n82 does it all for me. Here is the first attempt:
I'm extremely impressed at how Marc decided to "think out of the box" and come up with these ideas to enhance his painting experiences. Thanks for sharing Marc!
If you want to learn more about geotagging with the Nokia N82 click here.
If you want to learn more about time-lapse photography, click here.
To see more artwork by Marc Dalessio and check out his blog, click here.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
An Artistic Painter Finds Creative Ways To Use The N82 To Make Job Easier
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Photo & Video: Work At The Ports Captured By The N82
About 3 weeks ago I shared a few images I took of my workplace at the Port Of Long Beach. Longshoremen unload massive container ships coming in from all over the world, hovering 20 ton steel boxes over their heads to get the job done. Around 40% of all imports in the United States come through the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles every year. Everything down there is huge and heavy, limbs and fingers are being lost all the time. The longshore industry have some of the highest fatality rates in the United States. I spent my break capturing a few videos and photos of work getting done on the docks. The Nokia N82 really got some great footage.
Here is a video I shot of a 40 foot steel container being taken off a ship and landed onto a semi-tractor. After the video was taken I was able to use the built in video editor and add the title you see at the beginning of the video. There was a lot more I could've done as far as editing goes but didn't have the time because it takes some time to render.
The media below is using Flash, which isn't supported by some RSS readers. View full website if you don't see the media.
check out another video below...
The N82 and the xenon flash did great for some of the night shots you'll see in the slideshow below. A few of them I didn't use the flash because we're really not supposed to be taking pictures because of "security" issues, so I had to be more cautious. There was already adequate lighting so it wasn't really a problem.
Just for the hell of it I added a geotagged map below so you can get an idea of the geography of where the ports are located. Use the navigation buttons on the top left of the map to zoom into the blue thumbnails and check out the photos.
View Larger Map
If your interested in reading more about geotagging, check out this article. To see even more images of work at the ports, click here where you'll find more media that I have hosted at Share On Ovi. Learn more about Ovi, Nokia's free photo sharing service. Have you started using Share On Ovi to host your media?
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
We Have Built In Geotagging. Now What?
If you've picked up a Nokia N82 black or upgrade your original N82 to the latest firmware then you now have geotagging built in. What this does exactly is imprint the exact gps location onto your jpeg file. There are certain programs that can read this data and lay them out on a map for you or categorize your photos based on the location they were taken. A few include Flickr, Google Maps and Google Earth. I also came across a few PC based programs that have even more detailed maps that you can overlay your photos on.
In this older post from a few weeks back I talked about uploading photos to Google Maps and embedding them anywhere on the web. You can look back read that article if you want an example of embedding into Google Maps.
Before you start your own geotagged maps though you need to make sure of a few things. Go into your camera settings and enable record location. Then if your using Flickr to create the geofeed (the most common way) you gotta first go into the Flickr privacy settings and turn on the following...
When your logged into your Flickr, go to this page...
http://www.flickr.com/account/?tab=privacy
Scroll down to the area where it says "Defaults for new uploads" and you will see an option that says "import exif location data?". Click edit then click yes. Now any geotagged photo you upload Flickr will read the location data and allow you to put it on a map or give you the geofeed for embedding on other programs. Your geotagged photos that you have already uploaded won't show the location data, only newly uploaded photos.
Now when you go to your photo page you will see on the right side a "Taken In" line. Click the link "map" and you'll get just that - a map with your photo embedded. At the top of your Flickr page you can click Organize > Your Map. There you can find a full screen map of all your geotagged photos.
If you have a bunch of your photos from one even tagged you can view that tagged page and click "geofeed" at the bottom of the page. You will be given a link so that you can embed those photos into your Google Map or whatever map service that allows geofeeds.
Don't forget one thing though. These locations can be seen by anyone. If you want to erase the location data on a certain file look a few articles back here at the blog and read the guide. I got a few emails asking about this so that article should help.
For more information on geotagging with your N82 head over to this Howard Forums post where people are showing off their maps and giving eachother tips.
Have you mapped out your photos? If you have any you'd like to share, leave a comment below with a link to your map.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Freeware: Erase The GPS Location Embedded On Your Photos With Photo Detagger
With the release of the Nokia N82 black and the latest firmware update for the N82 titanium color our phones now have the possibility of geotagging all your photos. What this does is embed the exact GPS coordinates in each file so that you can later easily add them to a map for showing off your photos, just like I showed you last month in this post.
Well with this new feature comes a privacy issue. Don't forget if you leave this geotagging setting on every photo you upload to the internet can be downloaded by anyone. They can then view the exif data on the file and see when and where the file was taken. For certain pictures this can be a problem for various personal reasons. Maybe you don't want people to know where you live or where you were when the photo was taken.
One solution is to use a freeware java application called Photo Detagger made by Tea Vui Huang. I learned of this application today when I was reading a very informative post by Ricky at Symbian-Guru about taking your Nseries camera to the next level. What it does is strip down your file's exif data to the bare minimum.
Essentially what it does is converts your jpeg file to a raw format. Here's the exact descrption from the developers website...
With Tea Vui Huang's Photo Detagger on your mobile phone, you can now detag and wipe out all these tags from your photos before sending them out or posting it on the Internet! Previously, the only other way to do this on the phone was to use the phone's photo editor to alter and resave the file, reducing the quality of the photo in the process. Photo Detagger removes the tags without damaging the photos and in the process even reduces the size of the JPEG photos by about 3-5 KBytes as well.
The detagged photos will be saved to the "Images" folder of the microSD card with a "-001" suffix. You can then send out the detagged photos via MMS or upload it as per normal to your preferred photo-sharing websites or blog.
I've tried this out and it works exactly like it says. Only hassle is it can't dig into sub folders so you have to use a file manager on your phone or pc to move the image to the root images folder before Photo Detagger can see the file and do its work. Hopefully they will fix this in a future update to make the process a little easier.
Click here to download Photo Detagger for the Nokia N82.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Have You Upgraded Your N82 Firmware Yet To v20.0.062? Tips For Upgrading...
Well its finally here. The new Nokia N82 firmware. I've been seeing reports all over the internet of people starting up their PC Suite and Nokia Software Updater and downloading the newest firmware, version 20.0.062.
Tips before you upgrade:
- Even with the User Data Preservation feature of the N82 that keeps all your applications, settings, calendar entries, email accounts, etc. - Still backup your phone before updating. Use the backup tool in pc suite and backup all your important stuff. You never know when something can go wrong.
- Make sure you have a secure and fast internet connection. Make sure your connections are plugged in good.
- Set your phone on a flat surface like a desk or table. Don't put the data cable where a dog or person will hit the cable and disturb the update process. You can brick your phone like this then your in a mess of trouble.
- When your update says that its finished the phone might look off like its dead. Leave it alone for 5-15 minutes sometimes it takes awhile to boot up. Eventually it should boot up on its own after the update.
- Make sure your battery is fully charged before the update.
- I personally try not have anything running in the background on the computer and disable the screensaver just to ensure nothing goes wrong.
If anyone else has any tips please share in the comments below. Let us know if you've successfully upgraded to the newest N82 firmware.
Also check out this article by Steve Litchfield from All About Symbian. He has a few screenshots of the new firmware, showcasing the new features including geotagging and flash 3 support.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Photo Sharing: Point Ferman Lighthouse, Sunken City, & The Korean Bell In San Pedro, CA With The N82
Today my sister, girlfriend and myself headed out to San Pedro, CA. to visit Point Ferman Park where you can find a lighthouse and something even cooler called Sunken City right below the park. San Pedro is located on California's coast. We also visited the Korean Bell of Friendship that was given to America as a gift from South Korea over 30 years ago.
As we all know "Storytelling Rediscovered" is the catch phrase that Nokia uses to promote NOkia N82. In this post I'll share the story of my day by showing off the photos I took. Ever since I got the N82 I find myself taking a lot more pictures than I ever have and then sharing them later with friends and family. Storytelling with photos has been discovered for me.
The map below has a handful of the photos I took laid out in the exact GPS location they were shot. Using Location Tagger the N82 automatically tags all my photos with the GPS location. Location Tagger is a free application still in beta that you can try out on your phone. With the next firmware update and the release of the black N82 this will be built into the phone.
navigate and zoom using the controls on the top left to see more pictures
View Larger Map
Using the new Share Online 3.o the photos are tagged and uploaded to Flickr with one touch upload where I can then grab the feed and embed the photos into the Google map that you see below. I can go in and add titles and descriptions to each photo to explain the story of the photo. The map is live so if I go back there tomorrow and take some more shots I can upload them to Flickr and tag them accordingly. The pictures will show up on the map automatically so I can share them with friends and family. I find this great for recording trips and vacations to go back a look at them later.
Technology that the Nokia N82 brings changes the way we view our media. My parents keep photo albums that they pull out of a closet to show off when people visit. Of course this will never go away. But now we have more options. I don't keep a physical photo album myself. Instead I'll pull up a map on the internet just like the one above and show off all the pictures that way. For long distant friends or relatives I can email the map to them instead of waiting years to see them and show off my stories.
I was going to write up a tutorial to show you guys exactly how to do this but remembered that Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog wrote a good article a while back ago. Click here to learn how to embed your N82 photos on a map then onto your website, myspace, email, etc.
In the slideshow are photos from the Sunken City, Point Ferman Lighthouse, and the Korean Friendship Bell. Sunken City is a chunk of a park and road that simply fell apart and into the ocean. The land is on a cliff overlooking the ocean and just gave way over 50 years ago. I don't really know much history behind it but it was an amazing experience walking around all the rumble that is still there. Of course its all been vandalized as you can see. Some of the photos of the bunker with the locked door is a place where the US military had cannons that they could shoot into the water since Japanese subs were thought to be creeping up on the West Coast. Not sure if they ever did get that close, but it's nice to know thatour forces were there to protect us during World War II. The bunker now just sits there for everyone to check out.
Making this slideshow was easy using Ovi, Nokia's new online photo sharing service which is also integrated with Share Online 3.0. There are also ways to do this with Flickr but I prefer Ovi because of the simplicity. To make the slideshow you just go to the Ovi Channel you want to share and off to the right click the link "embed this channel". You are then taken to a page that looks like this where you can grab the code provided and embed it into your website, myspace, etc. I couldn't use Ovi for the maps because they don't currently support geofeeds like Flickr does. I've contacted Ovi about this and they said they are working on it and it will be available in the future. Hopefully that means soon so I can do away with Flickr and their $25 a year once and for all.
If you have any photos of places or events that you would like to share here at the blog via a slideshow in Ovi don't hesitate to contact me so that I can make a feature article.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Stavros: The Greatest Art Ever Made With The Nokia N82
Well the flamboyant and lively Stavros, the king of "position art", has made his greatest masterpiece. Using his Nokia N82 to track his steps via GPS, video, & photo, Stavros wandered around Rome creating a path that is layed out on a map which can be viewed at his blog.
Click here to head over and check out his art.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
New N82 Firmware Update Coming Soon, Bringing Built In Geotagging Of Photos
Great news for all N82 owners. There is a firmware update coming soon, and it should be a good one. There's not much info right now about the update, other than the fact that we will be getting Photo Geotagging built into the N82. Thats right. When you take a picture, the location will be embedded into the file of the photo using GPS. This is useful for social photo sites such as Flickr, Ovi, and Picasa that allow you to add your photos to a map. Great for showing of vacation photos or hiking trips. Not to worry though, this feature can also be turned off if you have no use for geotagging. If you really want this feature now and your an advanced user, Nokia has made the Location Tagger application available at Nokia Beta Labs. Keep in mind it might be buggy. Click here to check it out with instructions and downloads. I personally haven't tried it out.
No word on when the next N82 firmware update will be available, Nokia says Quarter 1, which ends in March. Hopefully they will add the Web Browser flash support which we've recently seen enabled in the Nokia N95 8gb. As soon as the firmware becomes available I'll be sure to everyone updated.
Do you think you'd find Photo Geotagging handy?
Source: Official S60 Blog
