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To add to the ever increasing arsenal of gadgets to never leave at home, comes the BT-1000P GPS Logger.

Having recently purchased the unit, especially for the purpose tagging all the photos for an upcoming trip, I flew away extremely happy, witnessing the outstanding performance of this little device. You can see a screenshot of Google Earth displaying the track below; its the takeoff from Sydney towards Tokyo.

What sets this unit apart from other loggers and GPS units on the market, is its ability to not only acquire a signal within the boundaries of an airplanes fuselage, but keep that sync as the airplane is banking. This latter achievement is the result of the -158dBm sensitivity rating of the unit.

Geotagging

In order to couple the data off the unit with your images, first of all you must make sure that the date+time is the same on both the unit, and your camera. Then based on the time of each point recorded and the time a photo was taken, the closest data point becomes the location of where the photo was taken.

There’s nothing you can do about the GPS, since its sync’ed with the satellites and stored in UTC. What is important though is to adjust the cameras time to the Time Zone of your location, this will save you much heartache later on when you have to adjust the times.

For my needs, I thought I’d try out HoudahGeo, and GPSPhotoLinker. I very quickly dismissed HoudahGeo, because I was unable to try it ‘properly’. By which I mean use it unrestricted for a period of my journey. I don’t believe its possible to evaluate certain software unless you can actually try your complete workflow with the software, and see if it fits, HoudahGeo unfortunately provides you with a handicapped version.

In comes GPSPhotoLinker, which is actually a free app, and gets the job done surprisingly well. What you’ll notice is that once you combine your photos with the exported data from the GPS, it will actually look up the City and Suburb data as well and embed that into the EXIF along with the GPS location. This is extremely useful for my Lightroom catalog where I can pick things based on the City as looked up by GPSPhotoLinker - brilliant! This is extremely helpful when you’re island-hopping, as is inevitable in Greece, or are merely in a new place.

As it stands, I think its a wonderful little unit that has served its purpose extremely well. I would highly recommend it, and will not be leaving the house without. It now lives at the top of my camera bag.

It seems that Apple left one thing out of the equation for Safari 3.1 - colour adherence. With my new Dell 2408WFP, I was getting quite stroppy - as no matter how many times I would calibrate it - it would continually not show the correct colours as compared to my MacBook Pro screen [matte] - or so it seemed. I initially posted two photos on DPreview hoping to ascertain some unknown out of the crown. Here is the MacBook Pro screen with the ‘correct’ colour. Read more »

Ever wanted to hide the left+right pane’s within Lightroom without having either custom defined shortcuts, or modifying OS X keyboard preferences to enable function keys? Read more »

The feature-set within Lightroom’s newly released 1.2 ‘update’ - should have really been a mere patch or a service pack, and carried the 1.1.1 designation - as that’s all it really is.

Lets have a look at some of the main new updates/fixes [complete list available over at Adobe]:

XMP bug - where Lightroom, upon having the “Automatically Update XMP metadata” setting - would run like a dog and simply become un-useable.
1:1 previews - Lightroom used to ‘ignore’ your request to disgard any full previews after a specific time-frame. I ended up [and I'm sure so have others] with over 5GB of ‘previews’ - which were supposed to be discarded on a daily basis.
Metadata Panel - If you’re a Windows user, you would have noticed intermittent display problems when trying to drop down the Metadata Panel.

As shown by the above, this is merely a fix-pack, and nothing else. Which is unfortunate given the feature-set brought along by the initial 1.1 update.
This tells us that either Lightroom was released as a Beta in V1.0’s clothes, and the real deal was provided in the form of 1.1 release.

Given the above performance, we shouldn’t be seeing any more updates for another 6 months. After which 2.0 will hopefully be released encompassing what I find missing in Lightroom:

• Dual monitor support - common guys [and girls], you can have detachable panels in Photoshop - and not in Photoshop Lightroom.
• Export Watermark embedding - what is available now on ‘Export’ - is a joke. There are workarounds, such as droplets in Photoshop; yet they either are too time consuming - or simply take too much time. Lightroom is about simplifying the photographers workflow, so give us a customizeable export tool.
• Smart Collections - I just wanted to look for all photos that I haven’t added any keywords to, and then thought I’d save that search for another day - guess what - you can’t! Lightroom doesn’t support smart collections of any kind. A quick look in google, revealed it’s a well known problem/limitation with Lightroom. Fingers crossed this will be addressed in the next version.

Many souls weren’t happy that Adobe didn’t support Canon’s 40D when they got it, in ACR and consequently in Lightroom.

Now you can jump for joy - as right now ACR supports 40D

Also note that on the page it lists Lightroom 1.2 as available also, yet this has been reportedly false. which is available for download over at Adobe