Strait of Gibraltar

So, after an encouraging announcement from the captain, we did decide to set our alarm clocks (on our iPhones) and get up to see what we could see while passing through the Strait.  It helped that land would supposedly be visible on the port side (left) and our balcony is on this side. So, at 4:45 we jumped up to turn off the alarm chime. Cindy pretty much took one look and after spotting some lights in the distance went back to bed. I settled down with my more positive attitude in a deck chair and waited. 

I tried taking a couple of photos with my phone, but about all I could see were these lights in the distance. It seemed to be a boat or two and maybe a town. We were passing by land and that was about all I could tell. 

I gave up about 5:15, but then remembered something I thought might be interesting to try. When you take digital photos some data, the EXIF, is recorded with your images. This is how you can find the data and time, the camera used, the aperture and shutter speed, etc.  On your phone and a couple of cameras, you may be able to capture something else - the gps coordinates of your location.

Most folks do not turn on the GPS feature because of the potential of identifying the location of those shown in the picture - perhaps children or a way to determine that you are not home. I have my gps feature on when I travel. Since I write about my travels, it makes little sense to pretend I might be home. 

The gps feature can be used in interesting ways. I often include some phone photos in the collections of photos I generate with my camera so that I can track the location of the images. All images would have the dates taken and the gps data in a few could allow many of the rest to be position by location. While years later one mountain may look like another, the gps data should allow you to determine which was where.

There are some other things you can do. You can automatically position the images on a map and in a hybrid view on a map based on satellite images. I decided to try this on my phone with the pictures I had just taken. Here is the result screen captured from my phone. Remember the images mark my position and not the position of what is pictured. It is interesting to see the distance the boat moved between the time at which I took the different pictures.

You can play around to explore this feature on your phone. This is the type of thing Cindy and I talk and write about. GIS (which is basically mapping data to locations) has many practical applications in agriculture, city planning, etc. You can do the same things for various kinds of educational projects. 

So, yes, I did take a photo while moving through the Straight.