Geotagging is a fairly new phenomenon, which is only maturing as the GPS, Digital SLR, and Internet world grow and evolve. It’s extremely practical to know where some pictures were taken, and many photo sharing websites will actually use this data to help group pictures together geographically. Plus, it’s just fun.

Some higher end SLRs (like the Nikon D300 or D2X) allow you to actually connect your GPS unit to the camera and automatically geotag your pictures with latitude and longtitude information.

However, this means having to attach the GPS to the camera, usually through the use of a specialized cable… and not every camera has this function. Though it’s handy (since the information is recorded “on the go”) there is another way which is a little more work, but a lot more flexible. » MORE

Shooting images on your camera using your memory card is a no-brainer… you pop the card in, and you go to it. Let’s say, though, that you’re shooting on location or in your studio and you want to get a better look at your pictures as you shoot them - without having to stop to download them. Your camera may have the ability to tether to your computer via a USB cable (or maybe even wirelessly). Just make sure that your camera supports (and is set to) PTP or Picture Transfer Protocol mode, and that you have the software support for it. » MORE

View Exif data like camera model, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and metering mode in your Firefox browser with the FxIF Firefox extension. Once you’ve got it installed, you just need to right click on any image and get the Properties of the image. In addition to your regular width, height, and alt text information, you’ll get the Exif data also. Of course, the Exif needs to be intact, so it won’t work on every image, but it should work on most full sized Flickr, Photobucket, or Pbase pictures for example. Anything that hasn’t been heavily edited should still have Exif.

Click here to download.

Digital noise. You hate it, right? I hate it too. It must be stopped. But how?

Noise is a result of our technological limitation to developing a sensor that can handle low light. Camera companies are building the best sensors they can, and they are getting better (see the Nikon D3) but they still have limits. If you turn up the sensitivity of the sensor too high, you’ll see that limit in the form of digital noise. A speckled, multi-colored mess of pixels overlaying the image (mostly in the dark portions of the image).

Film had these same limits, but it resulted in grainy images, which could have some charm to them. Noisy images have no charm. They look terrible. So, while we are certainly improving the cameras ability to handle noise at higher ISO’s, we’ll still get some if we venture to those limits, and beyond. » MORE

There are those of us who want vivid color, and those who want accurate color. These two factions battle with each other from time to time, and when they do, it’s epic. It’s like Spock and Kirk in the Amok Time episode.

For accurate color, Adobe Camera Raw has a great feature that will let you calibrate your color, through the use of a ColorChecker chart and the AcrCalibrator script from Chromoholics. » MORE

Many digital cameras don’t do black and white natively. Those that do shoot in black and white are actually shooting in color and converting in-camera - and they usually do a less than adequate job of it.

Something happened around the late 1990’s that saw a dramatic decrease in the number of black and white pictures being published. Though there were still a good number monochrome pictures being produced, it suddenly became more trendy for commercial photography and photojournalism to be shot in bright color.

I think with the loss of film, many of us started losing our taste for black and white images. Maybe that’s because it’s trickier to get a good looking black and white image now, as the one-stop “convert to black and white” button in cameras rarely do a stellar job.

Though black and white is still a very popular way of finishing a picture, within the realm of digital photography it’s more realistic to shoot in color and convert the picture in post-processing after the fact. This can be done differently in different software, but we’ll approach the Photoshop and the Lightroom method. Any application that gives you control over color channels and a conversion tool will allow you to get similar results, though. » MORE

Up until now, Firefox might have been a contender for the mightiest browser on the market, thanks to it’s extensive extensibility, but one of the things that Firefox has lacked so far is any kind of color management. That means there is no way to get color consistency on popular photo sites like Flickr, Pbase, Shutterfly, DeviantArt, etc.

Making sure the color looks the same from editor to sharing app is important for us. Certain other browsers let you do this, like Opera, so it’s certainly been a shortcoming of Firefox up until this point.

Now, thanks to the nice folks at Mozilla - with the newly released Firefox 3 beta you can activate color management (which is turned off by default). Just get into the address bar and type:

about:config

Then search for this line:

gfx.color_management.enable

…and set it’s value to ‘TRUE‘. After this is done, restart Firefox and BAM, you’re browser is using the ICC color management profile it inherited from your camera (or your editing software). You can download Firefox 3 Beta 2 from here. Remember, at this writing - version 3 is still in beta… so not all your extensions may be compatible.

Tagging and Keywording. These terms have been thrown around a lot lately, especially in blogging circles - but now they’re entering the world of photography, so I guess we need to learn about them. Damn.

It’s not so bad really. The good news is that Tagging and Keywording are really the same, so we only need to learn one thing. The bad news is, we still should learn it. Damn.

Most photo cataloging applications these days (like Picasa, or Lightroom, or Aperture, or iPhoto) give you the ability to keyword your photos.

When you dump a bunch of pictures on your computer, you likely organize them into collections or folders, but while that collection or folder name may be indicitive of the overall theme of the pictures within, it may say very little about the more specific content.

For example, I may have shot a hundred pictures at my yearly family reunion this past summer. I organize them into a folder and name it (maybe I call it Family Reunion 08-22-2007). I’ll likely end up having multiple Family Reunion folders over time, and I won’t recall which reunion I took those hilarious pictures of Uncle Dave at… just that I took some.

So I would want to add his name to the keyword list, and likely the fact that these are pictures of the family.

Uncle Dave, Family

Keywording lets you get as specific about the content as you like. Uncle Dave looked too funny with that giant squid on his head. I would keyword those Uncle Dave pictures further like this:

Uncle Dave, Family, Squid

This was the one year where we held the family reunion at Pernicious Park. Normally we hold them on the Island. So I want to make sure I mention that too.

Uncle Dave, Family, Squid, Pernicious Park

Dave was wearing a bright red t-shirt in most of these pictures. That may not mean much to me now, and I may not recall these particular pictures in the future based on the color of his shirt, but I may just want to find all my pictures by color at some point.

Uncle Dave, Family, Squid, Pernicious Park, Red

I could go on, but you get the idea. The more specific you get about your keywords, the easier it will be to find the pictures you want later on. I’ll never remember what date I shot these pictures on, or what the file name was. What I remember is the content of the pictures… so by classifying it (using keywords) I can search on those keywords later.

Granted, it is more work. But it’s worth it. Damn.