It was a very strange part of my life and very challenging for the whole family. In the end, all came to a fantastic conclusion and the kidney is still going strong. Thanks Dad and hope you feel a little lighter?!! (I know you read this!).

I kept a blog during this time, sparing few details and in fact I haven’t read it much since but at the time it kept me sane whilst in hospital and many people have read it.

I’ve done it!

The site is currently in prototype, very early at that, so please bear this in mind. Lots to do yet.

Go to http://dev.Journog.com

You will see a simple clean design consisting of a Google map at the top with placemarkers scattered across it’s surface and a content area beneath that. By default the most recently added location is displayed on the homepage. Clicking on placemarkers reveals the locations in their full glory at the bottom of the page.

Nice and simple hey?!

Well yes and no. Getting the geotags to work was fun and to begin with, most of my idyllic Hampshire towns were appearing off the coast of Somalia! I soon realised I had my hemispheres, lats and longs all in a muddle. Macgellan wouldnt have been impressed. Funny that I will be visiting what used to be believed as being the edge of the earth later this week to test my project out. We shall be heading for Portugal. A great opportunity to put it to real use.

The overall idea will be to shoot and write about great locations that you can visit too. Places that shouldn’t be kept secret. Ultimately I will invite other people to share their places too, always with the aim of inspiring other travellers. I will be seeking out competent photographer/writers in this quest.

How do I geotag?

I use a gps receiver that sits on the hotshoe of my camera which geotags every image I shoot (apart from indoors). This data is embedded in both RAW and Jpeg files with the EXIF data.

How do I add images and text to Journog?

I email them and the server processes the attachments, resizes them, extracts the gps, uses the subject and body of the email as the blog entry.

What next?

Follow the development site to see how it works. Fingers crossed it works whilst in Portugal!

All that I want to do now, is to work on the presentation of it and put it through a real-world test whilst we are in Portugal. Even better you will be able to see it.

I will reveal the URL before that time plus more details on the overall project, now I am more confident with its concept. Once it has been tested with my own photography and travel, I will be looking for contributors.

Until then, I’m not going to reveal much more other than to say I’m excited in that way that you are when you are developing something new!

Please feel free to ask questions!

Well not entirely but a big chunk of it is on the server side. You’ll have to bear with me a little longer before you can see something online. Plus a bit more if you wish to actually be one of the first closed beta testers.

Apologies if this is all a bit cloak and dagger but I don’t want to tell you what this is before there is something for you to see.

Anyway I’ve got my email photos to the server bit working. A little more work is needed on this before I can work on the front-end and that is where the fun will begin!

Expect more over the next 3 weeks and some further announcements.

This week I discovered a fantastic Android app that has certainly had a great impact on my daily life. Working in London as a web developer, I don’t tend to carry my full camera kit around with me nor do I have the time. Life certainly flies by too fast, far too fast to appreciate what is going on around me at times. However I do have a phone on me all of the time, it has a crappy camera though…

However Vignette (the aforementioned app) has made me think again. The toy cameras of yesteryear were all terribly flawed, they leaked colours, they were grainy and none of them were controllable in anyway. Focus? On your bike! It occurred to me (as it probably did Neil & Theresa, the developers of Vignette) that camera phones are no different. Just imagine carrying a Holga in your pocket, those classic unpredictable Russian cameras made of plastic. Well now it seems that you can.

You can visit the developers site at http://neilandtheresa.co.uk/Android/Vignette/ or download the app from the Android market.

The toughest decision is which lenses to take for the camera and last year, I think I did alright with this. I packed my 24-70, 30 and 18-200. You may quite rightly ask why didn’t I just take the last one? The answer being that it’s not much cop in low light, so would be of no use in churches etc. I can pack up to four lenses in my bag which fits within the size limits… but weightwise, not so sure.

I am also planning to take my netbook this year, so that I can offload all of my images onto it plus write my blog along the way. Hoping to squeeze it into my camera bag!

The fun of flying!

What do you take with you when traveling?  I’d be keen to know.

A busy year has flown by and I’m itching to getting back into some photography and travel again. My contracting work has kept me busy since I started it again in March, photography has suffered. Dammit! Not complaining mind you because other people have had harder years.

Naturally I will be writing about my travels here on the blog, sharing photos with you and so on. I believe the Villa we are staying at has wifi! However I am also looking to recharge the batteries! Only form of computer will be my android phone for writing blog entries on.

I am hoping that I will also be able to publish my photos on my new website project which will later replace www.Journog. com.

Looks like my train is approaching London, Waterloo.

Tchau!