Photo taking and geocoding

This morning I woke up at 6am, but thought it was a bit early to get up, so stayed in bed a bit longer. Eventually I did get back to sleep, but not for long as my other alarm woke me up at 7am.

After having a shower I went out to photograph the sunrise. Although I got out to where I wanted to go (the same place as I went the other morning when it was too cloudy) in time for the sunrise, I needed to be about 15 minutes earlier to catch the pink / purple clouds before sunrise. There weren't a lot of clouds around so it wasn't that annoying that I'd missed the dawn though.

After taking the sunrise photos I wanted, I took some photos of the nearby trees in autumn colours (the same ones I took blurred photos of the other day). I took a pano in the field there as well.

I went on up through the next field towards East Farndon, then along the road towards the main road that goes through East Farndon. I thought that I would then be able to go across a field towards the valley on the east of East Farndon, but actually that footpath was further down the road.

Rather than walking down the road and then back up across the field I was originally planning to go through, I thought I would go up through East Farndon, then across the fields towards the valley.

So I did this, and was relieved to find that the bulls in the fields didn't chase me. When I got to the point that I had been planning to visit, I found that actually I didn't think it was that great for a pano. (It was a point I had walked through probably in July and August and thought that it would make a nice place for a daytime pano).

I was surprised that the large drinking trough bowl there didn't have any water in it, given all the rain we've had lately. (I had been planning to put the tripod in the drinking trough bowl for the pano).

Anyway, I didn't think it was worth taking a pano so I didn't take one.

I then walked back across the fields to Harborough Road, and back home along the roads. I also saw someone from Church while I was out walking.

I got back home about 10am, and was hungry and thirsty since I hadn't had anything to eat or drink yet today. I heated a cinnamon whirl up in the oven for me, Mauser, Lad, and Clare (though Clare had actually already had her breakfast).

The rest of the morning and afternoon I spent copying the images to the PC, and geo-tagging them and some of my other recent images. Unfortunately I keep forgetting to use my GPS lately, so I had to manually geo-code them all. And the altitude lookup in Robogeo hasn't been working lately, so I had to manually look up the altitude for each image taken at a different location. So that's why it took most of the morning and afternoon to do the geo-tagging.

I also added a bit of other basic metadata to the images.

About 4.40pm I went out to try and take a pano of the sunset in a field I'd passed through on my morning walk. It had a really nice yellow hedge and yellow oak (I think) trees in it, but in the morning the sun was hitting the back of them.

They looked very nice backlit in the morning light, but I thought that shooting into the sun, the sky would either be blown or the leaves dark. And it was windy in the morning, so exposure blending wouldn't have worked well.

Unfortunately, by the time I got to the field in the late afternoon, the sun had hidden itself behind a cloud, so there wasn't the nice warm sunlight hitting the trees and hedge that I wanted. The sun started to shine through the cloud a bit, and it had nearly set behind the hill that East Farndon sits on. So I took a pano, knowing that I might not get another chance this year to capture the trees and hedge looking so nice and yellow.

Then a few minutes later, the sun started to shine through the cloud more strongly, so I took the pano again. It wasn't perfect though - the sun was shining through a layer of cloud, and so wasn't at its strongest, and the cloud wasn't lit up that well by the setting sun either. But it was better than the first pano (or at least should be, I haven't processed it yet).

I went back into the previous field, and did a pano near a muddy puddle there. I was planning to do some twilight panos near the building work that is going on in the fields, but after sunset the clouds just went to being grey instead of purple / pink, so I didn't bother.

When I got home I copied the evening photos to my PC then had dinner.

After dinner me and L watched Kamen Rider, Masked Rider, and Birdman Rangers Jetman.

Then I geo-coded the evening's photos. I had remembered to switch on my GPS and sync the GPS and camera clocks, so geo-coding was relatively easy, though since I only took photos in 3 different locations, and two of them were virtually the same, geo-coding manually would have been about the same speed.

While I waited for the images to geocode I checked my email, Nikonrumors, and Canonrumors. I changed my watch and alarm to account for the DST change tonight, did a backup, wrote this blog post, then went to bed.