A sense of where you were
The device on top of the camera is a GPS receiver.
One of the tasks of a travel author is to take decent photographs of the locales he is writing about, both as aides-memoires for the text and icing on the book's cake in the form of a photo section. Come March, the Lady Friend and I will be taking a ten-day-long trip to San Francisco Bay aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr primarily to gather new photos for the upcoming e-edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America.
As a photographer I tend to be an indiscriminate shooter, pointing the camera at anything and everything that appears in front of me, hoping to remember later what the subjects were all about and especially where they were shot. Is that a photo of the Colorado River at Dotsero or was it Orestod? Does this abandoned rail yard lie at Soldier Summit or somewhere else?
Some years ago I took a shot of a beautiful rock formation from the open vestibule window of a private car behind an eastbound Zephyr, but never used it anywhere because I couldn't identify the locale. Only after seeing someone else's similar picture of the same place a few weeks ago did I realize that I'd captured the western approach to Castle Gate, Utah, one of the lordliest sights possible from American rails. It's going to go right into the e-book of Zephyr.
Of course I should have taken notes on the individual frames, as a good photojournalist should, but "should" and "did" have different meanings. As a writer I am careful to do due diligence, but as a photographer I just have been too undisciplined.
But now...
