I haven’t posted in a few days because I have had a hard time coming up with something specific to say. I’ve been getting out with the camera a lot lately, which is good. It’s getting colder in the morning, and now I am beginning to understand why professional photographers can return to the same locations year after year, and not get bored or tired of it. Scenery changes. Things grow, things die, light changes, and so on. It’s a challenge I welcome, the act of looking at something I’ve looked at hundreds of times and extracting some new motif, something I haven’t noticed before. The significant inside of the insignificant, perhaps?

One of the geek things I’ve been doing of late is geotagging my photos. I connect my handheld Garmin to my camera via an obscenely over-engineered cable system and the coordinates of the camera are actually stored right in the exif metadata of the photograph. If you jury rig it right, the camera will also store the direction it was pointed in, since my GPS has an electronic compass. But how significant is the data I capture this way? All about the frame of reference, I suppose. In order to find the place I took the photo, you’d have to know that I was on the Earth when I took it. How do you find Earth, if you’re not from here?

Years ago, Dick Hardt posted a cool set of graphics to his blog that makes the point about how significant Earth is, relative to everything else in the Universe. Makes you think. And Antares must be freaking hogeous.