Back down today, which is a relief after yesterday’s alarming rise.

After a couple of quite nice and sunny days, it’s back to what seems to be normal for this year: more rain, much of it heavy, though with occasional breaks where it slows down a bit and it’s just a bit damp.

It used to be said that you could tell when summer came to Britain – that was when the rain got a bit warmer. This would appear to be about right, mutter. My lunchtime walk was limited to a quick visit to a shop or two while getting only slightly wet. What fun!

Today’s picture is a reminder of how different the weather was just a few days ago. This is the quite fancy tower of Newcastle Civic Centre:

Civic Centre

It’s been a few weeks since I first mentioned my Canon GP-E2 GPS receiver, so it seems like as good a time as any for an update. I’ve taken it out for a few walks in and around Newcastle, and I’ve got a few observations.

Every GPS thingy I’ve used takes a while to lock on to the satellites in the vicinity of Grey Street – I presume it’s the proximity of lots of buildings that causes that. The GP-E2 takes a similar amount of time, so don’t expect to be able to switch on and have an accurate location fix immediately. It only takes a minute or so, but it’s worth bearing in mind. I suspect[1] it’ll lock on quicker in more open locations.

Location accuracy in central Newcastle and Gateshead is generally at least as good as I’ve seen with other devices – within a small number of metres for the most part, with some variations which I’d attribute to local conditions, such as large masses of metal and concrete in the vicinity of the Pilgrim Street roundabout. Certainly good enough for knowing where your pictures were taken. One point that I read somewhere was that we don’t actually know how accurate the geographical coordinates are on the Google maps that are used by both Canon’s Map Utility and Lightroom, so it may not always be the device’s fault if the position is a bit off.

I ran into one slight gotcha. I’d set the camera options so that the camera’s time is set by the GPS device. What this does is set to the UTC time used by the GPS system. Nothing wrong with that, and in the UK it’s the same as local time for half the year, but at this time of year it’s an hour behind local time. Fortunately, Lightroom makes it easy to fix this – select all the images that have the wrong time, click the little icon next to the time field in the Metadata area and you’ll see this:

Select the “time zone adjust” option, set to +1 hours[2] and click the Change All button. Job done.

Or, of course, you could do what I didn’t at first, and from the Date/Time/Zone option on the camera menu, tell it that “Daylight Saving Time” is on. This sets the time offset for you. 

So far, I like the GP-E2 – I’ll post a long term review when I’ve had the opportunity to get to some more places.

[1] And I’ll be finding out soon
[2] Or whatever is correct for your location