Back in 2002 some friends and I took a trip out to Whistler, BC for some amazing skiing. One of the days we went heliskiing. Here’s video shot both by one of the guides mixed with some of my own.

I shot a lot of ski video that season, to follow up my 2000-2001 Ski Video. While I was just learning Final Cut when editing the first, I didn’t edit the second during the season and meant to wait till the summer. Sadly I never got around to it, so these video clips (along with many more) had been buried on tapes and hard drives in the basement.

Editing in iMovie 11 is much easier than the Final Cut 2.0 that I used (though still less capable). It’s enough to throw together simple videos which is about all I have time for these days. One annoyance is that its processing deinterlaces these old DV videos so the quality is somewhat degraded. Not a big issue with the guide’s lower-quality camera video here, but I would need to invest in FCE if I were ever to go back to editing my old DV.

Many modern photo gallery sites (as well as my own) now support geotagged photos–displaying where exactly they were taken on a map. Very few cameras, however, have a built-in GPS. For years I had considered getting a specific gadget for doing so, for $100-200 it is essentially a small GPS logging device that you later sync with software on your computer that matches up the time of each photo to find where it was taken and adds that information. But with the iPhone, you already have all you need.

PlaceTagger was one of the first iPhone apps to do this, and I grabbed it when it debuted a few years ago, but had only used it occasionally. Last month’s trip to Europe was the perfect opportunity to record the location of the hundreds of photos that I took. With the iPhone 4, PlaceTagger barely uses any battery either, about 5% per hour, and runs nicely in the background.

Typically the computer PlaceTagger app finds your iphone on the same network and works very easily to find its data. However I came across some trouble thanks to changing time zones. After some research, it turns out that PlaceTagger records time in GMT, then assumes the camera is set to the time zone of your computer. Of course that wasn’t true with my home computer. I had to export an XML file with the date range, then search & replace the times to correct for it (in my case, setting everything 5 hours ahead). Had I left my camera set to EDT, I wouldn’t have had that trouble.

So as I slowly start adding my Europe photos to my galleries, be sure to look for the Map link in most photos to see where they were taken. Of course, the iPhone does this all automatically for any photos taken with its own camera.

The Gorges du Verdon is the largest canyon in Europe and about an hour north of where we are staying. We visited on Saturday to see the impressive sights, as well as experience some of the craziest roads I’ve ever driven. The canyon itself is up to 2300ft deep, with many overlooks (and roadside edges) that drop straight down. The roads are thin and super curvey with many switchbacks, even more so the roads needed to get to the area. They were made tougher by the too-large Ford I was driving and the crazy locals that would fly by in the other direction within inches, but the roads would truly be a blast in a MINI.

We stopped very late for a meal in the cute town of Aiguines near the top end of the gorge, then continued down past the Saint Croix lake and up to Moustiers Sainte-Marie, a small town on the side of a cliff. The town’s geography is incredible, with chapel on the peak, cliffs looming over all the small shops and cafes, and a natural spring flowing through the center to a large waterfall below.

Our drive from southern France to Nürnberg Germany was long and tiring, but I was able to fully experience the Autobahn. Which is to say, sitting at a dead stop in construction traffic more often then driving over the standard 120kph. We were able to just reach 200kph a few times in our rental Ford Mondeo wagon. I used MotionX’s free GPS app to precache the maps and track the route which you can view here.

My photos of our fantasy football drafting trip to New Orleans have been posted in the gallery.

A mirror from the 1700’s at Tijauges in New Orleans, and an aweseome bartender to go with it.