I picked up this little instant camera, the Fujifilm Instax Mini 7, at our Burseldon Car Boot Sale on Sunday - and what a bargain it was! Boxed, with instructions and a 10 pack of Instax Mini film, it only cost me £5, much cheaper than anything comparable on eBay. The film was five years out of date, but as it turned out that didn't matter one bit...
If you've been following the podcast recently you'll know that I've developed a habit of buying Instant Cameras without any film. First there was the Fujifilm Instax 200, then the Polaroid "Spice" Cam, then the Polaroid Model 1000 (Onestep) Land Camera. All without film!
The thing is, instant film, whether it be old expired Polaroid Stock, new Impossible Project Film, or new Fujifilm Packs, isn't cheap. Genuine Polaroid film goes for silly prices, Impossible Project packs are about £20 for 8 shots, but the cheapest is the still-in-production Fujifilm Instax Mini. If you buy more than one pack at a time, and shop around a bit, you can get Instax Mini Film for about 50p a photograph - not too bad, and cheap enough as an occasional indulgence, so the Mini was the Instant Camera I really wanted.
I could hardly believe my luck when in the last row, at the last stall, just before we were about to go home, I saw the boxed Instax Mini 7 you see in the video at the top of this article. We all had a play with the camera that afternoon, taking photos of each other and enjoying the magic of seeing the photographs appear from nothing.
I'm not saying the Instax Mini 7 is a great camera, or that the photo's it produces are exceptional, but it's the most fun we've had with a camera for a long time, and you can't beat the look on someone's face when they see an instant photo develop for the first time.
Our new smart-phones may have built-in GPS, and even some new compact cameras have the ability to embed location data into the exif data of our photographs, but if you want to add the location of where you took your photos into the meta data, most of us are still going to need a Geotagging device, such as the Qstarz BT-Q1000XT Travel Recorder.
So why do you need a Qstarz Geotagger? Well, imagine in twenty years time when your kids (or grand-kids) are going through your photographs on a computer, and they come across a shot they really like.
"Hey Grandad, where did you take this cool photo of that Army Tank?" The kids say.
"Just click on the location link next to the image," You reply, "And you'll see..."
The children click on the link, and a 3d image of the world appears. The screen zooms in, showing a photo-realistic simulation of the location of where you took the photo. There's even directions for how to get there.
If you include GPS data to your photos you can actually do this now. Flickr has map links, Picassa is the same, and you can even create .kmz files for Google Earth that will let you follow the path you took when taking the photographs, and let you see the images themselves, in situ.
To get location data into our digital photos we need to carry a device such as the Qstarz BT-Q1000XT. As we walk around it tracks our latitude and longitude (from GPS Satellites), along with a time stamp, which we can then synch with our images when we get home. As long as we've set the time accurately on our camera, the supplied Qstarz software will match the time the photograph was taken, with the time from the Tagger, and merge the two.
The Qstarz software goes further than this. I really like the way that it allows you to create those afore mentioned Google Earth .kmz files. I love being able to see the my photographs on Google Earth, and the track I took that day too. Here's an example.
You can also use the Qstarz BT-Q100XT as a bluetooth enabled GPS reciever for your Smart-Phone or laptop, to elsble it to become a Sat Nav. It also can be triggered with a built-in motion sensor, it can be used as a speed-warning device, and is fully customizable via the supplied software.
Capable of recording up to 40 days worth of GPS data (as long as you charge it every now and again) the Qstarz has enough memory for most applications, and is extremely simple to use. It also comes with a USB lead / charger, case and car charger.
So, if you're in the market for a GPS Photo-Tagger to enable you to Geotag your digital photographs, you can't go far wrong with the Qstarz BT-Q1000XT.
Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 7:21PM 
This week I talk about a couple of car-boot-bargains and the photo kit I took on our Isle of Wight Holiday.
