I’m a hiking fanatic. We can blame my old roomate Clint for that. One morning I was hungover, he knocked on my door and the next thing I know I’m halfway up a cliff on South-East Queensland’s highest mountain, trying not to throw up and basking in the magnificent views and physical exertion. So it’s no surprise going through my photos that a lot of them are from random hiking destinations.
Recently my collection of impulse-bought technology has grown to reflect this hobby/obsession. I’ve got a Garmin Dakota 10 GPS which tracks my movements and allows me to (hopefully) not get lost. In the last 2 months I’ve gone out and bought a Panasonic Lumix FT-3 waterproof/shockproof camera that has an inbuilt GPS. It cuts down on my hiking weight when I don’t want to carry a SLR + lenses, and survives my falls, swims and sudden rain showers.
So what do I do with all of this location specific data? Well plug it all in to Google Earth of course. At an old job I created an interactive presentation using Google Earth for a mining conference, flying across the globe, visiting locations and showing the work we did. Over the last 2 days, I’ve tried to replicated that with my photos and GPS tracks!
So the idea is you can fly around where I went and see the pictures I took. I like it as a way to revisit my photos with context, instead of just looking at them.
I’ve only spent a few hours on this and it has been thrown together rather sloppily, but if you want to see the few hikes I’ve done in the last two months, download the Google Earth file here!