I have no problem with people using my photos, provided they ask first, and provided they don’t then bugger them up.

These two things don’t always happen. If I am not asked, then of course I probably will never know that they have been stolen. There is the occasional exception; but you just have to accept that if your put photos up on the internet, people are going to steal them and you are unlikely to find out.

But the real pain comes when you provide the photos, and the photos are abused. It’s almost, but not quite, like seeing your children being tortured.

The most painful example arose from a request from the windsurfing club for some shots that they could use for advertising. We set up a special shoot and captured some great images. The light was right, the wind was right, and the camera was pointing in the right places at the right time; fantastic. Really happy with the results which could have been printed at A2 or higher on laminated plastic and would have looked amazing. Instead they were printed on cheap corrugated junk and looked utter shit; the photos might as well have come from an ancient phone camera. I die a little inside every time I pass them.

And now I have been pierced through the heart again; and it’s another windsurfing shot. You may recall this from a few weeks ago:

In a bid to tempt consumers, camera manufacturers have built all manner of crap into their products. Pet recognition, an option that will only take a shot if people are smiling, baby galleries. If you are mildly serious about photography; all of these are a complete waste of time. But one gizmo which I wouldn’t mind having is GPS tracking; so that each photo would be marked with the location where it was taken. Not for me of course, but for the wonderful readers of this organ who frequently often occasionally once asked where it was that I took some photos.

In the absence of such facilities in my cameras, I turned to my phone. Not so long ago you only used you phone for making phone calls; but nowadays you kill pigs with angry birds, read the news, fuck around on Facebook and generally waste your life on a three inch screen. Turns out you can also use it to geotag your photos.

GPS4Phone runs on the iPhone. Start it up and you get this:

For general shooting you can capture your location every five minutes. If you are walking around a large temple site and want to record the exact position of every photo, you can capture a point every 30 seconds. If you only want to capture the occasional point, you just give the phone a shake while it is in your pocket. But be careful, you can get thrown out of temples for apparently masturbating via your pocket.

Once you have finished your photo session, you end the capture and can review a map showing the capture points:

Then you generate a QR code which you photograph for future use.

Back home and you place all the photos you want to tag (RAW or JPG) into a directory, along with the photo of the QR code. Then you run a piece of software downloaded from the GPS4Phone site and it reads the QR code and magically alters the exif of all your photos to include location information.

I was going to try this out with our recent visit to the bat temple. But I discovered a fatal flaw with the concept; if you forget to run GPS4Phone before you start taking your photos, it doesn’t work…. In fact, I remembered I had forgotten when we were driving home from the temple. Luckily, there was another temple stop on our way home, the pretty place near the service area on the Bangkok-Chonburi motorway. So I tried it and it worked a treat. When I loaded my photo to Flickr, the location of the shot was shown on a map.

One of the many joys of living in Thailand is that you never really understand what is going on. The whole country operates in an alternative state of reality, like a bad sci-fi movie. As an outsider, all you can do is observe, bemused and amused, while weird stuff happens. And it doesn’t get much weirder than a general election.

You can tell there is an election on the way when the verges at the side of the road are crammed with banners bearing photos of heavily Photoshopped thugs. Most seem to offer the unsubtle message “vote for me or else I’ll break your nose”. The thug fashion parade is currently in full swing, so I know an election is coming.

I don’t know the exact date, sometime in July I think; but if there is no beer available then that is probably the day. It is necessary to ban alcohol on election days, otherwise the Thais would be so depressed at the appalling candidate choices that they would turn to drink to null the pain. Another sign that it is election time is when we experience a coup. If there is a coup, then count back about four days and that will have been election day, with the “wrong” winner.

There are a zillion parties contesting the election. Only two have a realistic chance of securing substantial votes; the remainder will tag along and offer to join a coalition with one of the main parties in exchange for their detailed manifestos for improving the country being adopted by the government cash.

Each party has a number. This is because the names of the parties sound depressingly familiar. Choose any three words from “Thai democracy nation united love motherland social people” to form a jingoistic phrase; and that is probably a party name. Easy to get confused, so just pick a number.

Party number 1 are Phak Puea Thai.

After two years, my GF1 camera looks like it has been pulled backwards through a hedge of barbed wire and then given to teething children as a comforter. Please forget I just told you this because I may wish to sell it later in the year, at which point it will be advertised as being in “pristine condition with minor blemishes”.

The new toy is the Fuji X100 and, however it may function as a photographic device (it continues to delight and frustrate me in equal measure), it is undoubtedly a thing of beauty; and I have decided I want to keep it looking that way. And so:

As I am sure you are (not) aware, today marks the end of the Apple WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference). Several days of intellectual masturbation, where those who develop for the Apple platform attend intense programming presentations and drink too much. The second bit is not highlighted in the publicity material, but every conference I have ever attended has featured “drinking too much” as a core activity.

I should have been there, but tickets to the event sold out in a couple of hours. I rather hoped that my elevated status as an advanced programmer would have secured me a personal invitation from Mr. Jobs, but no such luck.

By “advanced programmer” I mean I have downloaded the development software and bought a book.

An early morning trip with Nik to Wat Pho Bang Khla. Arriving at the temple, the trees appear to be full of strange fruit.

Presumably a member of an obscure French anti-environmental group.