The arrival of an admittedly half-arsed geotagging feature on the E-M1 means I should be able to provide better location information on future shoots. But rather than making my wonderful readers scramble around in exif files, how pleasant it would be to display this information in a post.

There are plug-ins for Wordpress which purport to provide this feature; but my new theme has it built in; which means I can show you a photo, together with a Google map showing where it was taken. Orgasmic or what?

“New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks” - Mark Twain

As I have neither the energy or the permission to be promiscuous, and my capacity for alcohol reduces almost daily; New Year’s is of no particular use to me. However, it is the time when Wordpress reminds us of our annual statistics and it is with great sadness that I have to report a drop in visits to this hallowed organ. What happened? Well, what happened was a post in 2012 about Art in Paradise which attracted massive* international attention and a skewing of the statistics for 2012. A look over the years is more relevant, numbers are thousands of visits:

*Good name for a band.

Taking a break from my pussy tending duties, it was off to the undergrowth yesterday morning, to discover that all that was on offer was the same breed of caterpillar (spikeus boringus) in several locations; plus the occasional butterfly that had little interest in posing. But here a few shots, displayed for the first time in the new Pattaya Days widescreen format. Orgasmic or what?

I know what you’re thinking: What? The?  Fuck? Let me explain.

The old version (curse be upon it), had a space for posts and a space for a sidebar which held necessary info such as recent posts and comments. But this meant that the space available for posting photos was not as wide as I would have liked. This new version (blessed be its name) has a separate page for the blog, which means that blog posts can be wider and display bigger photos. This is a good thing.

Pattaya Days wishes all readers (apart from one, you know who you are), a very happy new year.

Since my last post, I have had a chance to play with more with this feature. My comments are based on using Firmware 1.1 in the camera and the current IOS versions of the Image Share Application.

Geo-tagging.

My comment in the last post: “This (Geo-tagging) is potentially very useful, provided all the shots on your camera are from the same location and you remember to geotag them before you jump in your car and drive home” was incorrect. In practice, this is what you do:

My neighbour has been a micro four thirds user for almost as long as me, and an E-M5 owner since the camera was first released. So when his brother sought recommendations for a new camera, an E-M5 with a selection of lenses was suggested as the way to go.

But brothers are wayward creatures, and instead of coming home with an E-M5, he staggered over the threshold with a Nikon D600 and three lenses. Family tension ensued.

My first digital camera was a Canon 300D. I was vaguely aware that it had a 1.6 crop sensor, which apparently meant that my 50mm lens would show a different field of view to that shown with the same lens stuck on a full frame camera. My response to this was “so what?”; I was very familiar with the field of view of this lens on my camera and I really didn’t care how it worked on another camera which I did not, and would never, own.

I then moved to a 30D and eventually a 1D which has a 1.3 crop. I never bothered calculating the full frame equivalent of my expanding lens collection on these cameras; it was completely irrelevant. Thankfully, other camera owners never seemed interested in the topic either. 5D owners never walked up to me to belittle my sensor for being smaller and having some apparent deficiency caused by “equivalence”. Just as well they didn’t, or else I would have advised them that my camera knocked out ten frames a second, which was about the time it took their camera to acquire focus for a singe shot; so could they please just bugger off.

Then came MFT, and we all knew the implications of the size of our sensor in terms of field of view, depth of field, high ISO performance etc., and it wasn’t important because we loved our little cameras and the images they produced.

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