Hey, it's September, where are our M grips?

[beewee]

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Beewee,

 

Many thanks. Very interesting.

I guess I won't be waiting so anxiously for the GPS hand grip any more.

Except that grip is also to provide other functionalities.

Luckily there is an iPhone GPS App that works very well with a camera.

 

 

You're very welcome.

 

If the main reason for getting the handgrip is for the GPS capabilities, there are many other alternative options available on the market.

 

I regularly take my M8.2 (and occasionally my X Vario) to the mountains on very long hikes (6-12 hrs is the norm). You can easily use a Garmin GPS watch or a handheld to log your GPS track and export it onto your computer in the GPX file format. Once you have the GPX file, you can load it into Lightroom 4 or Lightroom 5 Map module and tag the photos using the Map module. How this works is that lightroom compares the time stamp on the photos' EXIF information with the timestamps of each position in the GPX files and matches the photos to a specific position.

 

Where things can go wrong in the above method is as follows:

 

1) Your camera time is set incorrectly so the photos are geotagged to the wrong location (not a big problem if you're staying in one place and your camera time is off by 1 minute but can be a very big problem if you're moving very quickly such as driving on the highway where you travel at 1 mile per minute - or 60 MPH).

 

2) Your GPS receiver outputs the position in the wrong time zone so the timestamps on the photos is not matched with the GPX position times.

 

For either (1) or (2), you can correct this in lightroom by shifting the timestamps of either the EXIF capture time or the GPX position times.

 

The one thing that you DON'T have to worry about is that your GPS receiver time is off by a few minutes. Generally speaking, the clock on your GPS receiver is the most accurate clock you'll ever own (unless you keep a cesium or hydrogen maser clock in your basement) because the GPS receiver has to solve for the time offset between its onboard clock with those of the satellite clocks and it does this down to the sub 10 nanosecond level. This means that your GPS receiver clock is sync'ed to the GPS atomic time standard to within less than 10 nano seconds.

 

The only thing that can go wrong in terms of the time on the receiver is that the timestamps being outputted is set for the wrong time zone which will be shifted by an integer number of hours.

 

 

For more information on geotagging your photos using a third-party GPS receiver in lightroom, check out this video:

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[beewee]

 

and you can't read Chinese (or French, German, Italian, Nepalese, etc...), how do you know which mountain top you took those photos from?

......

Apart from Chinese, can always try Google Translator.....

 

 

On a more serious note though, I think few people realize the power of having photos geotagged with a position. Lightroom's Map module barely scratches the surface of what you can do with positioning information.

 

Here are some examples of what having position information on your photos can do:

 

1) Search for all photos taken within a specific area, country, park, locale, state, etc...

 

Imagine you like to visit a specific location over and over again throughout the year and that you're working on a project where you want to photograph the same scene at different times of the year with different seasons. Now you have to do that over many months and potentially many years. How do you easily search for photos taken at that one specific location?

 

If every photo you took had a position tag, you can easily draw a small (10-20 meter) circle on the map and retrieve ever single photo from that location in an instant.

 

Want to do the same thing for a specific country? Type in the country name and you can extract your photos based on country without having to manually keyword by country, state/province, city, etc...

 

2) Quickly tell where you take most of your photos. You can easily generate graphs of how many photos you took of different location. Planning a trip to photograph somewhere you have gone in the past but want to be more efficient and know which areas are more scenic? You can see how many photos you've taken in a given area on a map and easily pin point the most photographically productive locations (or which area generated the most keepers).

 

3) You've shot some nice photos but wished you were there at peak light. You can know the exact location (even if it's in the middle of no where), look at it on a topographic map and using some software such as the photographers ephemeris, know what time the sun/moon will appear on a given day and know exactly how to line up that perfect photo with the proper background.

 

Planning on photographing a unique astronomical event such as a solar eclipse? You can use astronomical predictions to know exactly which direction the eclipse will be for a given locale and then go back to your archive and find the ideal background/foreground that will give the most interesting perspective with a solar eclipse.

 

Want to shoot northern lights and want to know where a good location is based on previously successful photographic locations? Again, you can go back to your archive and check to make sure you have a good view of the northern sky (if you're in the northern hemisphere)

 

 

 

The above ideas are just the basics. In the next few years, when MEMs gyro/magnetometer/accelerometers/barometers cost mere pennies, we'll see not only be able to get position information for photographs but also orientation. So you can tag not only the location but also the angle of view (combining focal length information) so you know the exact perspective that a shot was taken with. In fact, I would not be surprised if Sony has integrated smartphone sensor information with the new QX100.

 

 

Once you have this information, you can take it even further by merging photos taken from different perspectives and merge the information together to build not just panoramas but also 3D models. The generation of panoramas is how Google generates its street view images. It's also how some 3D models of famous architectural buildings are generated as well.

 

 

Even with the Map module in Lightroom, it really has barely scratched the surface of what positioning information can do when combined with photographs and other information such as focal length, distortion parameters, etc... Power line companies currently spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to use this type of technology to analyze how much power they can send through major transmission lines while maintaining required ground clearance (the power lines sag as they heat up from the increased power transmission and weather conditions), imagine if you can make use of this same technology just using your own camera - whether it be a Leica or a smartphone.

[Guest NEIL-D-WILLIAMS]

That's true, but if you took a photo from the top of a mountain in China (or France, Switzerland, Italy, Nepal, etc...l) and you can't read Chinese (or French, German, Italian, Nepalese, etc...), how do you know which mountain top you took those photos from?

 

For that matter, if you took a photo of some really interesting trees in the middle of an oasis that is in a giant desert, how do you know which oasis it was? Or where it was?

 

I don't agree sorry. If the picture that you took is special then absolutely you will remember the place where you took it. If you can't remember them then who gives a shit where you took it

[marknorton]

You throw an interesting issue into the mix - the difficulty of providing an effective antenna in a metal, hand-held device but I have never noticed my hand-held GPS loses signal while I am holding it, though it doesn't have a large amount of metal nearby. I can certainly see that putting the antenna in the grip which is then shielded with metal on one side and flesh on the other will make reception difficult.

 

Nikon use an external GPS module that sits on the hot-shoe but I have no experience of it.

 

The other issue is that is needs to be permanently powered because the delay to acquire its position at start up is much too long. How much power would a typical GPS chipset use? Again, my handheld GPS has quite a short battery life though it is a couple of years old. There is a danger that having this thing on will seriously degrade battery life in the M.

 

The other issue I have is that the grip has to be removed from the camera to replace either the battery or the card and I wonder whether the delicate looking interface connector is up to all those mating cycles.

[k-hawinkler]

I have the SOLMETA DP-GPSN2 for my Nikon cameras.

It also records the direction of the camera relative to the earth's magnetic field.

The device has a rechargeable battery in it.

When it's exhausted one can switch over to the camera battery.

 

These days I prefer using gps4cam on my iPhone.

One GPS device is all one needs to attach coordinates to images from all the cameras one has used.

Of course that requires synchronization of camera clocks.

[beewee]

I don't agree sorry. If the picture that you took is special then absolutely you will remember the place where you took it. If you can't remember them then who gives a shit where you took it

 

To each their own.

 

That being said, if I were randomly wandering the streets of Old Jerusalem and got an amazing street shot of some thing that is not the Wailing Wall, I'd care to know exactly where that it was taken. Even if I knew exactly where it was taken after I load the images onto my computer, there's no way to know that I'll still remember 30 years later. Yes, I'll know it was some dark street in Old Jerusalem but where exactly?

[beewee]

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You throw an interesting issue into the mix - the difficulty of providing an effective antenna in a metal, hand-held device but I have never noticed my hand-held GPS loses signal while I am holding it, though it doesn't have a large amount of metal nearby. I can certainly see that putting the antenna in the grip which is then shielded with metal on one side and flesh on the other will make reception difficult.

 

Nikon use an external GPS module that sits on the hot-shoe but I have no experience of it.

 

The other issue is that is needs to be permanently powered because the delay to acquire its position at start up is much too long. How much power would a typical GPS chipset use? Again, my handheld GPS has quite a short battery life though it is a couple of years old. There is a danger that having this thing on will seriously degrade battery life in the M.

 

The other issue I have is that the grip has to be removed from the camera to replace either the battery or the card and I wonder whether the delicate looking interface connector is up to all those mating cycles.

 

 

Battery life has always been an issue with GPS receivers but they have come a long way in terms of reducing power consumption in the last 3 years. That being said, the problem with the current handhelds is that companies like Garmin keep stuffing new power consuming features like gyros, barometers, magnetometers, accelerometers, fancy big touch screen LCDs. All of these things end up eroding what power was saved with newer chipsets.

 

To put things into perspective, the first real high sensitivity GPS chip (SiRFstarIII) consumed about 160mWh of power while operating in good opensky conditions and up to 320mWh of power when it's searching for satellites. This was 6 years ago.

 

Today, the newest generation of GPS chips from Sony and others consume about 30 mWh in similar, good open sky conditions. This is a 5-6x reduction in power consumption by the receiver chip itself.

 

Jobo also has an interesting product that doesn't need to be on all the time. It uses a different GPS positioning technique that essentially takes snapshots of the signal and processes that data on the computer to get the position at a later point (i.e. when you upload the images on the computer). This is an interesting concept and the device can last for up to 1 month on a single charge. This product hasn't developed a whole lot of traction though, mainly because few people care to download data off the hot-shoe receiver (similar to Nikon) and then having to run yet another piece of software to get the position to geotag their images. Also, this second GPS positioning technique generally has less sensitivity compared to conventional GPS receivers.

[marknorton]

Realistically, users buying this thing will expect fit-and-forget so that you turn the camera on to take a picture and it's tagged. There's no space for a separate battery so that means the GPS receiver must be powered from the camera battery, switched on independently and left on all the time, perhaps with a timeout to power it down if the camera is not used. You then need a clear status display showing whether the thing is running and working - there is no point having this thing if you take pictures expecting them to be tagged but they are not because there's no GPS fix.

 

As for power consumption, and assuming a DC-DC converter to run the thing, the power might go up to 50mWh if Leica are using an up to date chipset. The M battery is rated at about 14Wh (7.4v, 1900mAh, but I don't have the camera with me to check), so that would suggest only a modest impact on battery life over the course of a shooting day. What we can't have, I think, is the GPS powering down if you switch the camera off.

 

The idea of a hot-shoe mounted antenna would not fly either because the space will sometimes be occupied by the EVF.

[Guest NEIL-D-WILLIAMS]

For the love of me I just don't know why anyone would want to have a GPS in a camera.........beyond me

[jaques]

the potential of tagging for searching and organising images and all this other stuff really is quite amazing... but I don't want the grip for that...

 

I I don't want it for gripping either...

 

For me I only want the grip for things it enables- like tethering and the ability to attach a flash/strobe when there is an evf fitted.. I wish those things were built right into the camera...

[photolandscape]

I understand all the possible issues with the GPS grip, but why can't Leica meet demand for the simple "dumb" grip (14496)--simple plastic and metal, nothing complicated. There must be a reasonable demand for this, so why not satisfy it. I hope they aren't linking the two production of the two grips. There are lots of people who will plunk down $275 for the basic grip--why not give them what they want now and make some money?

[skuromis]

What reason other than finances could explain Leica's inability to deliver simple accessories, that in all likelihood are contracted out items, a year after announcement?

 

Sometimes it can be very simple: Somebody forgot to approve the project, somebody didn't order materials, some Marketing guys are still discussing if the colour is the right or the wrong red, some decision needs to be taken, but nobody follows up, some machine parts needed to be ordered and instead of 10 months lead time they have a delay... you need more?

[Guest WPalank]

I thought that part of the idea of having a Leica M system was to have a small camera. Why would you want to add that monstrosity of a grip to the M anyway...............

 

Yeah, I know what you mean by monstrosity. Some may even say tacky. Here's a link to another such beast someone posted:

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/leica-m9-forum/299206-hey-its-september-where-our-m.html#post2500756

 

Oh....wait.....sorry....it's... errrrrr...

 

Re GPS:Something tells me you'll never get it.

I travel to the middle of the Sahara and Afar Deserts. might come upon a Bedouin Camp or Oasis off the grid. Geotagged...

 

There was a really interesting building in Phnom Penh that I walked through and photographed many of the occupants. Many of them under age prostitutes. I wanted a specific US Governmental Agency to be aware of it but hard to describe where it is how to get to it. The group may send officers/case workers there without me. My driver only spoke Khmer. Geotagged....

 

Parlor trick: I give lectures on Adventure/Environmental Photography. While in the LightRoom Modules, access Geotag and suddenly Google Earth gives anything from a Bird's Eye View to a view from the street either actual or drawing. You zoom in real-time with the LightRoom Module to the ACTUAL location in real time. As a forward thinker, maybe some time I will have a friend standing there and we go to Face-Time on our Smartphones and I launch that on to the Projector Screen. Everyone so far has awwed at this as they didn't know it was possible. Wait for it....Geotagged. One MUST have IMAGINATION to get it. I could go on, but sadly...

[jaapv]

I'll stick with my iPhone GPS4Cam app;)

[Guest WPalank]

That's what I've been using except when using <$1000 cameras that have it built in already.

[algrove]

That's true, but if you took a photo from the top of a mountain in China (or France, Switzerland, Italy, Nepal, etc...l) and you can't read Chinese (or French, German, Italian, Nepalese, etc...), how do you know which mountain top you took those photos from?

 

For that matter, if you took a photo of some really interesting trees in the middle of an oasis that is in a giant desert, how do you know which oasis it was? Or where it was?

 

Well now, the GPS location comes out in the language you request in the menu, not in the local language where you are standing. Jono's GPS coordinates came out just fine in English even though he was in France or Switzerland while skiing.

[beewee]

Well now, the GPS location comes out in the language you request in the menu, not in the local language where you are standing. Jono's GPS coordinates came out just fine in English even though he was in France or Switzerland while skiing.

 

 

I think something got lost in translation here (pun intended ).

 

When I was referring to the local language, what I meant was that you were not able to ask someone where you were and note it down on pen and paper (or in memory).

 

Note also that GPS coordinates don't really have a language per say. Coordinates are generally either represented in geodetic form (latitude, longitude, height) or Cartesian (X,Y,Z). These coordinates are then referenced to fixed points on the earth. For example, GPS coordinates are generally referenced to a ellipsoid called WGS84 (World Geodetic System established in 1984) which is a mathematical approximation of the average sea level across the earth. It is not exact and in some areas the height can be off by over 10 metres (especially in mountainous areas) in comparison to 'true' sea level based on the Earth's gravity field. Maps on the other hand are usually represented either in grid coordinates (X/Y) or 2D geodetic coordinates (latitude/longitude) and projected from a 3D surface (earth) onto a 2D surface (map). That's why depending on the projection, you'll noticed that some world maps look very different from others in terms of the size of countries. The coolest projection (in my opinion) is the Dymaxion projection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map) invented by Buckmister Fuller who also invented the bucky ball and Geodesic dome (like the famous Disney Epcot center's Spaceship Earth).

[algrove]

beewee

Oh my gosh is all I was trying to convey is that it worked on Jono's in England and in various other countries. It also has worked on the S for some time even inside thick walled forts and fortresses where I have been with S users and which I have witnessed.

 

Most people are fully aware of the coordinates used by a GPS since many establishments publicly issue their coordinates and most GPS can give you coordinates of where you are standing with the touch of a button.

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Hallo,

Look here: Leica M

[Dougg]

I think the point was that the GPS is useful where locally-available info at the time on the spot is insufficient for various reasons. I just downloaded a couple of free apps for my iPhone to see if they help. I don't plan on getting the Multifunction Grip, but the smaller regular grip is tempting.

[Rick]

beewee - So, how do other cameras solve these problems or do they also suffer from these problems of reception. Are we expecting too much of this technology when implimented into a camera that we hold onto and hang from our neck?

 

I understand that plastic bodies and better placement of the antenna etc... But, it seems that to some degree all cameras would not provide the ideal platform for GPS reception.