Website

This site was created using iWeb and .Mac, which we’ve found extremely easy to use.  My old site was straight HTML generated by hand and through scripts, but iWeb is far easier to use.  We use iPhoto for managing photographs, and iMovie and Final Cut Express HD for video editing.

Google Earth and Panoramio

Google Earth has to be the single best piece of free software ever--and one of the best things about it (and one of the worst, sometimes!) is that anyone can contribute information that will be displayed in it.  We use Panoramio to place some of our photos in Google Earth, and the “Share Placemark” feature in Google Earth for other data.  To do this, you need to geolocate your photos, which leads to...

Geolocating Photos   

We use GPSBabel+ for Mac OS X to download track data from our GPS.  It worked perflectly the first time, without me bothering to read any instructions.  Once we have the GPS data, we use PhotoGPSEditor to add GPS coordinates to the photos. 

Panoramas

I downloaded the demo version of DoubleTake and was blown away with how trivial and intuitive it was to use--I didn’t have to do any manual alignment, and in some cases I only had to drag and drop photos into the window and the results were flawless.  I immediately bought a license for it to support its development.  This is a great application.  Being able to produce panoramas this easily will change the way you shoot photos--you’ll always have panoramas in mind.

Other stuff

We also like what Google’s doing for the internet (particularly Google Earth), so we don’t mind supporting them (and this site) with Google AdSense ads--hopefully they’re not too distracting, and maybe you’ll actually find something useful through one of them.  We apologize for any offensive or ridiculous ads that show up!

Camera

The majority of the photos on this site are from an Olympus C-8080WZ camera.  The main reason I bought this camera was its ability to do wide field of view shots (down to 28mm equivalent focal length for a 35mm camera) for bouldering and landscape photography, and it’s been great for that.  Because of this camera’s wide angle ability, it’s more limited than some other cameras in the same class when it comes to long focal lengths (but I’d rather be stuck with limited zoom, instead of limited field of view, given the types of photos I take the most of).

GPS

We use a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx for gather GPS data.  We’ve used it with both Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux, but despite having it for over a year we still haven’t gotten around to buying a base map for it.

A final plug for Apple

We use a Mac with OS X (10.4) as our primary computer at home, and this is hands-down the best overall computing experience I’ve had.  Just so you know where I’m coming from, I learned to program as a kid on a TRS-80 model 1, then switched to a Commodore Plus/4 and 128, then PCs running DOS (“what do you mean I can’t have a data structure larger than 64K--I have 8 MEGABYTES of RAM!”).  Unix and X Windows (on SGIs, PCs, and Suns) restored some sanity to the process, as did Linux.  I still use and prefer Linux for software develoment (which is my day job), but at work and home I use a Mac for everything else.  This is by far the most usable and least stressful computer and OS I’ve used.  Long live Apple.

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