“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet,
when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their
picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.
“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a
chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”
…
Not that hitch-hiking is remotely as much a thing today as it was 50 years ago, but even if it were then it wouldn’t be so revolutionary to, say, take a photo of everybody you give a
ride to. We’re all carrying cameras all the time, and the price of taking a snap is basically nothing.
But for Doug Biggert, who died in 2023, began doing this with an analogue camera as he drove around California from 1973 onwards? That’s quite something. Little wonder he had
to explain his project to his passengers (helped, later on, by carrying a copy of the photo album he’d collected so-far that he could show them).
A really interesting gallery with a similarly-compelling story. Also: man – look at the wear-and-tear on his VW Bug!
You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street
View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.
Can you tell where we are, yet?
A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the
world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.
Cheating at GeoGuessr
I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT1, I pasted
screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:
ChatGPT confidently assessed the geographic clues, translated some text that it found, and eventually made a guess down to a particular street in St Petersburg.
That’s pretty spooky, right?
The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in
GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.
This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:
Again, the text recognition and translation capabilities of the AI were highly useful, but it was helped by architectural and cultural clues too.
This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.
But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.
Don’t think I’d have done better, though.
Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a
“send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra
details to it).
And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning
on the side2.
The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can
even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.
What about other photos?
The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the
kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and
other unsavoury types.
Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English,
indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of
the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of
Spain’s known characteristics.
Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle.
These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement
and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of
Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.
Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731
✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that
distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.
Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry
or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially
visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken
in Istanbul.
Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784
✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower3 was a nice move.
Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The
architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”)
supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina.
The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.
Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678
❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing
and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was
recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).
So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and
strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.
Footnotes
1 And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out
of a legitimate victory!
2 I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody
feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in
person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly
kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)
4 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer
get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.
A conversation about staying private and stripping EXIF tags on blogs lead to shdwcat asking the question “what would happen if you took a picture on the moon?”
…
However, I figured we could do better than “a point high above the Earth.” If you could state the coordinate system, you should be able to list an actual point on the moon.
…
It’s a fun question. Sure, you need to shoot down the naysayers who, like colin, rightly point out that you couldn’t reasonably expect to get a
GPS/GNSS signal on the moon, but still.
GPS on Earth
GPS (and most other GNSS technologies) fundamentally work by the principle of trilateration. Here’s the skinny of what happens when your GPS receiver – whether that’s your phone,
smartwatch, SatNav, or indeed digital camera – needs to work out where on Earth it is:
It listens for the signal that’s transmitted from the satellites. This is already an amazing feat of engineering given that the signal is relatively quiet and it’s being transmitted
from around 20,000km above the surface of the planet1.
The signal fundamentally says, for example “Hi, I’m satellite #18, and the time is [some time].” Assuming your GPS receiver doesn’t contain an atomic clock2, it listens for the earliest time –
i.e. the closest satellite (the signals “only” travel at the speed of light) – and assumes that this satellite’s time represents the actual time at your location.
Your GPS receiver keeps listening until it’s found three more satellites, and compares the times that they claim it is. Using this, and knowing the speed of light,
it’s able to measure the distance to each of those three satellites. The satellites themselves are on reasonably-stable orbits, so as long as you’ve been installing your firmware
updates at least once every 5-10 years, your device knows where those satellites are expected to be.
If you know your distance from one satellite, in 3D space, you know that your location is on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius of that distance, centered on the
satellite. Once you’ve measured your distance from a second satellite, you know that you must be at a point where those two spheres intersect: i.e. somewhere on a circle. With a third
satellite found and the distance measured, you’re able to cut that down to just two points (of which one is likely to be about 40,000km into space, so it’s probably not that
one3).
Your device will keep finding more passing satellites, measuring and re-measuring, and refining/averaging your calculated location for maximum accuracy.
So yeah: that tiny computer on top of your camera or within your wristwatch? It’s differentiating to miniscule precision measurements of the speed of light, from spacecraft as far away
as half the circumference of the planet, while compensating for not being a timekeeping device accurate enough to do so and working-around the time dilation resulting from the effect of
general relativity on the satellites4.
GPS on Luna
Supposing you could pick out GPS signals from Earth orbit, from the surface of the moon (which – again – you probably can’t – especially if you were on the dark side of the
moon where you wouldn’t get a view of the Earth). Could it work?
I can’t see why not. You’d want to recalibrate your GPS receiver to assume that the “time” satellite – the one with the earliest-apparent clock – was much further away (and therefore
that the real time was later than it appears to be) than an Earth-based GPS receiver would: the difference in the order of 1.3 seconds, which is a long time in terms of GNSS
calculation.
Again, once you had distance measurements from three spatial satellites you’d be able to pinpoint your location, to within some sphere of uncertainty, to one of two points. One would be
on the moon (where you know that you are5), and one would be on the far side of the Earth by almost the same distance. That’s a
good start. And additional satellites could help narrow it down even more.
You might even be able to get a slightline to more satellites than is typically possible on Earth, not being limited by Earth curvature, nor being surrounded by
relatively-large Earth features like mountains, buildings, trees, and unusually-tall humans. It’s feasible.
How about… LPS?
If we wanted to go further – and some day, if we aim to place permanent human settlements on the moon, we might – then we might consider a Lunar Positioning System: a network of a dozen
or so orbiters whizzing around the moon to facilitate accurate positioning on its surface. They’d want to be in low orbits to avoid the impact of tidal forces from the much-larger
nearby Eath, and with no atmosphere to scrape against there’s little harm in that.
By the time you’re doing that, though, you might as well ditch trilateration and use the doppler effect, Transit-style.
It works great in low orbits but its accuracy on Eath was always limited by the fact that you can’t make the satellites fly low enough without getting atmospheric drag. There’s no such
limitation on the moon. Maybe that’s the way forward.
Maybe far-future mobile phones and cameras will support satellite positioning and navigation networks on both Earth and Luna. And maybe then we’ll start seeing EXIF metadata spanning
both the WGS-84 datum and the LRO-ME datum.
Footnotes
1 That’s still only about a twentieth of the way to the moon, by the way. But there are
other challenging factors, like our atmosphere and all of the obstructions both geographic and human-made that litter our globe.
Some younger/hipper friends tell me that there was a thing going around on Instagram this week where people post photos of themselves aged 21.
I might not have any photos of myself aged 21! I certainly can’t find any digital ones…
The closest I can manage is this photo from 23 April 2003, when I was 22 years old.
It must sound weird to young folks nowadays, but prior to digital photography going mainstream in the 2000s (thanks in big part to the explosion of popularity of mobile phones), taking
a photo took effort:
Most folks didn’t carry their cameras everywhere with them, ready-to-go, so photography was much more-intentional.
The capacity of a film only allowed you to take around 24 photos before you’d need to buy a new one and swap it out (which took much longer than swapping a memory card).
You couldn’t even look at the photos you’d taken until they were developed, which you couldn’t do until you finished the roll of film and which took at least hours –
more-realistically days – and incurred an additional cost.
I didn’t routinely take digital photos until after Claire and I got together in 2002 (she had a digital camera, with which the photo above was taken). My first cameraphone – I was a
relatively early-adopter – was a Nokia 7650, bought late that same
year.
It occurs to me that I take more photos in a typical week nowadays, than I took in a typical year circa 2000.
This got me thinking: what’s the oldest digital photo that exists, of me. So I went digging.
I might not have owned a digital camera in the 1990s, but my dad’s company owned one with which to
collect pictures when working on-site. It was a Sony MVC-FD7,
a camera most-famous for its quirky use of 3½” floppy disks as media (this was cheap and effective, but meant the camera was about the size and weight of a brick and took about 10
seconds to write each photo from RAM to the disk, during which it couldn’t do anything else).
In Spring 1998, almost 26 years ago, I borrowed it and took, among others, this photo:
I’m aged 17 in what’s probably the oldest surviving digital photo of me, looking like a refugee from Legoland in 640×480 glorious pixels.
I’m confident a picture of me was taken by a Connectix QuickCam (an early
webcam) in around 1996, but I can’t imagine it still exists.
So unless you’re about to comment to tell me know you differently and have an older picture of me: that snap of me taking my own photo with a bathroom mirror is the oldest digital
photo of me that exists.
Write about a few of your favourite family traditions.
We’ve got a wonderful diversity of family traditions. This by virtue, perhaps, of us being a three-parent family, and so bringing 50% more different
traditions and 100% less decisiveness over which to accept than a traditional two-parent family. Or it might reflect our outlook and willingness to evaluate and try new things: to
experiment and adopt what works. Or perhaps we just like to be just-barely on this side of the line across the the quirky/eccentric scale1.
Having family photos taken in the style and dress of the Victorian era might be becoming a family tradition: this hangs proudly in our living room in the space formerly occupied by
its similar predecessor from some years ago.
But there are plenty of other traditions we’ve inherited or created, such as:
Pancake Brunch Sundays sort-of evolved out of a fried Sunday breakfast that used to be a household tradition many years ago. If you come visit us for a weekend you’ll
find you’re served pancakes (or possibly waffles) with a mixture of traditional toppings plus, usually, a weekly “feature flavour” around midday on Sunday. For no reason now other
than it’s just what we do.
Sunday Brunch stops for nothing, not even birthdays.
Family Day is an annual event, marked on or near 3 July each year, with gifts for children and possibly an outing or trip away for everybody to enjoy. It celebrates
the fact that we get to be a family together, despite forces outside of our control trying to conspire to prevent it.2
Family Film Night takes place most months: in rotation, the five of us take turns to nominate a film or two that we’ll all watch together along with snacks and sweet
treats. It might be seen as a continuation of the pre-children tradition of Troma Night from back in the day, except that we don’t go out of our way to deliberately watch terrible
films: now that happens just as a result of good or bad fortune! We also periodically schedule a Family Board Games Night, and a Family Videogames
Night.
Books! Books books books! BOOKS!
Christmas Eve Books: a tradition we stole from Iceland is that we give books on Christmas Eve. Adults in our household now don’t really get Christmas gifts, but everybody present is encouraged to exchange books on Christmas eve and then sit up late reading together,
often with gingerbread, chocolate, and/or a pan of mulled wine keeping warm on the stove. I find it a fun way to keep my reading list stocked early in the year, plus it encourages the
kids to read3
Festive meals, while I’m thinking about that end of the year, are pretty-well established. Christmas Eve is all about roast duck pancakes. Christmas Day sees me roast
a goose. New Years’ Eve is for fondue. Plus vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) alternatives to the otherwise-unsuitable things, of course.
I’m certain there must be more, but the thing with family traditions is they become part of the everyday tapestry of your life after a while. Eventually traditions become hard to see
them because they’re always there. I’m sure there are more “everyday rituals” that we’ve taken on that are noteworthy or interesting to outsiders but which to us are so mundane
as to be unworthy of mention!
But every single one of these is something special to us. They’re an element of structure for the kids and a signifier of community to all of us. They’re routines that we’ve
taken on and made “ours” as part of our collective identity as a family. And that’s just great.
Footnotes
1 Determining which side of the line I mean is left as an exercise to the reader.
2 It’s been what…? 6½ years…? And I’m
still not ready even emotionally to blog about the challenges we faced, so maybe I never will. So if you missed that chapter of our lives, suffice to say: for a while, it looked like
we might not get to continue being a family, and over the course of one exceptionally-difficult year it took incredible effort, resolve, sleepless nights, supportive
families, and (when it came down to brass tacks) enough money and lawyers to seek justice… in order to ensure that we got to continue to be. About which we’re all amazingly grateful,
and so we celebrate it.
3 Not that they need any help with that, little bookworms that they are.
Did you ever see a Whopper™️ that looked like this? Me neither.
If I ran a fast food franchise affected by this kind of legal action, do you know what I would do? I’d try to turn it back around into marketing exercise with a bit of crowdsourcing!
Think about it: get your customers to take photos and send them to you. For every franchisee that uses a photo you take, you get a voucher for a free meal (redeemable at any
outlet, of course). And where it appears on the digital signage menus they all seem to have nowadays, your photo will have your name on it too.
Most submissions will be… unsuitable, of course. You’ll need a team of people vetting submissions. But for every 50 people who send a blurry picture of an unappetising bit of
sludge-meat in a bun; for every 10 people who actually try hard but get too much background in or you can see the logo on their clothing or whatever; for every 5 people that
deliberately send something offensive… you might get one genuinely good candid burger picture. Those pics get pushed out to franchisees to use. Sorted.
Now if anybody complains that you fake your photos you can explain that every one of your food pictures was taken by a real-life customer, and their name or handle is on the
bottom of each one. Sure, you get to vet them, but they’re still all verifiably genuine pictures of your food.
And you probably only have to do this gimmick for a year and then everybody will forget. Crowdsourcing as a marketing opportunity: that’s what I’d be doing if I were crowned
Burger King.
Taking a photo of our kids isn’t too hard: their fascination with screens means you just have to switch to “selfie mode” and they lock-on to the camera like some kind of narcissist
homing pigeon. Failing that, it’s easy enough to distract them with something that gets them to stay still for a few seconds and not just come out as a blur.
“On the school run” probably isn’t a typical excuse for a selfie, but the light was good.
But compared to the generation that came before us, we have it really easy. When I was younger than our youngest is , I was obsessed with pressing buttons. So pronounced was my
fascination that we had countless photos, as a child, of my face pressed so close to the lens that it’s impossible for the camera to focus, because I’d rushed over at the last second to
try to be the one to push the shutter release button. I guess I just wanted to “help”?
Oh wait… is there something on that camera I can press?
In theory, exploiting this enthusiasm should have worked out well: my parents figured that if they just put me behind the camera, I could be persuaded to take a good picture
of others. Unfortunately, I’d already fixated on another aspect of the photography experience: the photographer’s stance.
When people were taking picture of me, I’d clearly noticed that, in order to bring themselves down to my height (which was especially important given that I’d imminently try to
be as close to the photographer as possible!) I’d usually see people crouching to take photos. And I must have internalised this, because I started doing it too.
Another fantastic photo by young Dan: this one shows around 80% of my mum’s face and around 100% of my dad’s manspreading.
Unfortunately, because I was shorter than most of my subjects, this resulted in some terrible framing, for example slicing off the tops of their heads or worse. And because this was a
pre-digital age, there was no way to be sure exactly how badly I’d mucked-up the shot until days or weeks later when the film would be developed.
I imagine that my dad hoped to see more of whatever bus that is, in this photo, but he’s probably just grateful that I didn’t crop off any parts of his body this time.
In an effort to counteract this framing issue, my dad (who was always keen for his young assistant to snap pictures of him alongside whatever article of public transport history he was
most-interested in that day) at some point started crouching himself in photos. Presumably it proved easier to just duck when I did rather than to try to persuade me not to crouch in
the first place.
As you look forward in time through these old family photos, though, you can spot the moment at which I learned to use a viewfinder, because people’s heads start to feature close to the
middle of pictures.
This is a “transitional period” photo, evidenced by the face that my dad is clearly thinking about whether or not he needs to crouch.
Unfortunately, because I was still shorter than my subjects (especially if I was also crouching!), framing photos such that the subject’s face was in the middle of the frame resulted in
a lot of sky in the pictures. Also, as you’ve doubtless seem above, I was completely incapable of levelling the horizon.
This is the oldest photo I can find that was independently taken by our youngest child, then aged 3. I’m the subject, and I’m too close to the lens, blurred because I’m in motion, and
clearly on my way to try to “help” the photographer. Our ages might as well be reversed.
I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since, but based on the photo above… maybe the problem has been me, all along!
One of the best things about working atThe Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford? Pretending to be a PhD student for a photo shoot! Watch out for me
appearing in a website near you…
My team and I do get up to some unusual stuff, it’s true. I took part in this photoshoot, too:
I’m absolutely not above selling out myself and my family for the benefit of some stock photos for the University, it seems. The sharp-eyed might even have spotted the kids in this video promoting the Ashmolean or a recent tweet by the Bodleian…
“Passport Photos” looks at one of the most mundane and unexciting types of photography. Heavily restricted and regulated, the official passport photo
requirements include that the subject needs to face the camera straight on, needs a clear background without shadow, no glare on glasses and most importantly; no smile.
It seems almost impossible for any kind of self-expression.
The series tries to challenge these official rules by testing all the things you could be doing while you are taking your official document photo.
…
I love this weird, wonderful, and truly surreal photography project. Especially in this modern age in which a passport photo does not necessarily involve a photo booth – you’re often
permitted now to trim down a conventional photo or even use a born-digital picture snapped from an approved app or via a web application – it’s more-feasible than ever that the cropping
of your passport photo does not reflect the reality of the scene around you.
Max’s work takes this well beyond the logical extreme, but there’s a wider message here: a reminder that the way in which any picture is cropped is absolutely an artistic
choice which can fundamentally change the message. I remember an amazing illustrative example cropping a photo of some soldiers, in turn
inspired I think by a genuine photo from the second world war. Framing and cropping an image is absolutely part of its reinterpretation.
One of the benefits of being in a camera club full of largely retired people who were all into photography long before digital was ever a thing, is that lots of them have old film,
paper and gear lying around they’re happy to give away.
Last year I was offered a photographic enlarger for making prints, but I initially turned it down because I didn’t think I’d have the space to set up a darkroom and use it. Well,
turns out with a little imagination our windowless bathroom actually converts into a pretty tidy darkroom with fairly minimal setup and teardown – thankfully we also have an
ensuite so my partner can cope with this arrangement with only minimal grumbling
…
My friend Rory tells the story of how he set up a darkroom in his (spare) windowless bathroom and shares his experience of becoming an
increasingly analogue photographer in an increasingly almost-completely digital world.
A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy.
Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”
It was presented to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether
unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we know it.
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically
every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native
Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
…
While I’m not sure that it’s fair to say that Lena “remained a mystery” until now – the article itself identifies several events she’s attended in her capacity of “first lady of the
Internet” – but this is still a great article about a picture that you might have seen but never understood the significance of nor the person in front of the lens. Oh, and it’s
pronounced “lee-na”; did you know?
So Reflex are now designing the 2.0 version of the camera they’ve so far yet to ship version 1.0 of – or even find manufacturing partners for. Add to this the nonsense of trying to
build a set of primes, film processor and scanner without securing any more funding and I’m increasingly leaning towards this…
