Hey Y'all ! Hope you're having a great week. Me? Doing great. This week I want to talk about GPS. When I first started out in photography in the 1970's (yes I'm that old) there was no such thing as GPS (Global Positioning System) Now if you want to go somewhere you can't live without it. I remember driving from North Carolina to New Mexico with just a map a road atlas if you will. But now a days I can't go anywhere with out my GPS. We use GPS for all kinds of stuff. Our phones have it and when you log on somewhere the internet knows where you are because of GPS . We use maps on our phones and GPS is certainly a big thing but what about in photography? I think GPS can be very important in photography. Especially Travel Photography. We have the ability to attach a GPS coordinate to the photo we took and can tell where and when it was took. This is a fantastic thing. Now I have written about GPS before in previous blogs but I heard a Podcast from the "Digital Story" and thought I would echo some of what Derrick Story said in the podcast. By the way if you don't listen to the podcast you should. So what good is GPS in Photography?

Fire BushValley of Fire State Park Nevada. GPS in photography can be used in many ways. First of all it can be used for posterity . When were gone and one of our grandchildren are looking at a photograph of Mom and Dad and wonder where that photo is taken they can look at the GPS data and tell exactly where and when it was taken. I personally think that if you're not at home taking photo's you should have a GPS coordinate attached to your photo. Have you ever gone through your photos and found one that was pretty awesome but didn't know where it was taken? GPS would fix that. You can use it to see where you have been and what photo's you took where. It's pretty neat! But how do I get GPS on my photo's? Fall Colors House

Getting the GPS on your photo's can be done many ways. The first and easiest is if your main camera has GPS built into the camera. Not many camera's have this but some do. The next best thing is to attach a device to your camera that records the GPS and puts the data on the photo you take. Most camera companies make these but are expensive and attach to your hot shoe usually so you will have something sticking off of your camera. The next best way is with Bluetooth. All Smart phones have GPS and if your camera has bluetooth capabilities then through your camera software you can get the data from your phone via bluetooth and it will record to your photographs. Cockspur Lighthouse This is the way that I do it. And there are other ways. While your out shooting you can pull out your cell phone and take a photo then when your in post you and manually sync the photos that you took in the same area to the cell phone shot. And last but not least is the manual way by going to a map in editing software like Lightroom and manually putting a dot on the map and linking it up with photos you have imported to Lightroom. For me the bluetooth auto linking works best for me. I use Sony software for my cameras and after fiddling around the first time and syncing the camera and the app on my phone it works pretty seamlessly. But it didn't always but the app is better and it syncs pretty quick . I'm sure that the other Camera companies are pretty similar and will work seamlessly like the Sony does for me. You'll just have to do some research to find out how to get them to talk together. For me I will check at the first shoot of the day if they are not synced I can manually do it pretty quick and it will automatically do it all day. Sometimes it picks it up very fast and I don't have to do anything. But I do have to check. If I'm using 2 cameras it only syncs to one at a time so I just have to choose a camera and sync the other in post.

Using GPS on travel photography is fun and easy to do and I think everyone should be doing it. So until next week Get out and Shoot! 

Hey if you want to check out my photography go to my instagram account Max Stansell Photography there are over 2000 post there. Here is the link

 Max Stansell Photography Instagram Link