Breadcrumbs for Your Camera

On September 11, 2001, I ventured out onto the street after hearing the sounds of jets crashing into the WTC. I lived two blocks away at the time. I strolled up and down Broadway, and finally made my way onto Fulton Street when the first tower came down — All the while, I was snapping away not knowing that the day would become seminal in our nation’s history.

A few months later, I saw a little article on CNN discussing how the National Institute of Standards and Technology was trying to find images of the buildings that weren’t available through the newswires to try to reconstruct how and why the buildings collapsed.

I sent in my images and received notice from Dr. Bill Pitts requesting more high-res images from the day. Dr. Pitts and his crew went about meticulously reconstructing where I was at what time, and what my pictures show. A time consuming effort indeed.

Sony GPS-CS1. Unlike the current crop of geotagging hardware devices, this little guy just sits in your pocket or hangs on your belt. As you move around it simply records where you were at what time. When you get home, you download the GPS data, and run it through their software which mates up with your digital pictures based on the time/date. It can even plot out the course you took during the day.

Like most things Sony, this may very well end up in the “didn’t quite make it” pile, but I find the notion of this device pretty fascinating, and would love to see other camera vendors integrate the ability to mate this type of GPS stream data into their camera software (I use a D2X, Nikon!).