As always the full set can be viewed on Flickr.

Thanks everyone for making it such a great weekend. I certainly enjoyed my first weekend away this year, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

I'll also be adding some photos from Jersey Zoo when I get around to it.

I'm trying to watch the Superbowl, but am getting a little distracted by the snow thats building up outside.

Going to be a nightmare trying to get to work tomorrow.

Well we have a couple of options. First (and easiest) is to manually enter the location. Nice and simple. However, I'm not a fan of this method. First, of all it only works well if you have a reasonable idea of your location. Secondly, if you take half as many shots as I do on holiday, then the prospect of spending a few hours tagging each image doesn't really appeal.

The second option is to use a GPS device and then sync the records it produces with your photos. The theory is simple when activated, the logger will make a record of my GPS co-ordinates every few seconds. This then builds up into a very accurate trail of your movements. The simplest analogy would be the breadcrumbs from Hansel and Gretel.

I personally use a GPS logger from Holux, snappily titled the M-241. It's a small film canister sized unit and is very simple to use. When switched on, it will automatically begin logging until you instruct it to stop. No fussy set-up, no sorting files - turn it on and it is ready to go. When ready, simply upload the track using Bluetooth. Unfortunately, this model is not officially supported on the Mac. This tends to be the case with 99% of the GPS loggers that I looked at. Luckily some enterprising people wrote a piece of software called BT747 which allows the unit to be used with the Mac. It's not the best looking bit of software, but it is functional.

Once we have our tracks uploaded to the computer, the next step is to get the co-ordiates into your photos. Thankfully the situation here is rather healthier as there are some very good pieces of software for the Mac to perform this exact task. The way it works is that the software looks at the timestamp on the GPS co-ordinate, and the timestamp of the photo you have taken. When it finds a match, it writes the co-ordinate into the photos metadata and voila one geotagged photo.

But enough about the theory, lets see how it works in practice.

The first and most important step is to ensure that the internal clock on your camera is in sync with the clock on your GPS unit.

If these times differ, then your photos are going to be tagged with incorrect location data.

Once your logger has a fix on the satellites and is starting to record its log, then you're good to go!

The next stage is the fun part - go out and take your photos.

Once back at your computer, launch BT747 and click 'Get Log' to download the track you have have just made to your computer. When downloaded, you can export this into other formats such as a KML to view the trail in Google Earth. For this example we will convert our file to GPX.

At this stage I would recommend copying your images off of your memory card and into a directory on your computer. Although this next stage can be done directly on the memory card, its better to be safe and not modify your original files.

The program that I recommend to sync your GPX file with your photos is name HoudahGeo - we'll launch this now.

HoudaGeo requests its data in stages. First we'll add our image files.

As we can see, there is no positioning information at this time. Now we open the GPX file we created with BT747.

Immediately, HoudaGeo has compared the timestamps and matched the co-oridinates to the photos. We can now save the information, and the files are available to use.

Now what?

So now we have our geotagged images, what can we do with them? Well in iPhoto, they have a new feature called 'Places'. It's something that I'm looking forward to playing with, but what can we do without iPhoto?

I store all my images in Lightroom - Adobes excellent organisation and cataloging program. If we take a look at the metadata in Lightroom, we can now see the GPS co-ordinates, and by clicking on the arrow next to it, we can see where the photo was taken using Google Maps.

As you may know, I put a few of my photos on Flickr. Flickr has had support for geotagging for quite some time. When a geotagged image is uploaded, Flickr identifies this and automatically places it on a pop up map linked from the photos page.

Flickr also has maps in which shows all your geotagged images on a much larger map. You can also perform image searches from this map and see other users geotagged images.

Here we can see I've geotagged images in England, Scotlad, Turkey and of course Guernsey.

Another Mac application is Ovolab Geophoto. This places your images on a Google Earth style globe. You can zoom in for more detail, and it will also show a marker in Google Earth. In the example below, you can see the photos taken around Holloyrood Park when for Steve and Gina's wedding. Thats one of the nice things about geotagging, you can see exactly where you were at the time of the photo.

One other thing that I like to do with the GPX file is to import it into a program called RubiTrack. It actually has nothing to do with photography, and is designed as a fitness monitor. I use it as a catalogue for my trails. It has a nice mapping feature, and records such details as the weather conditions when then trail was made. it can also read some of the more advanced data such as speed and altitude.

It makes for a nice reminder of the places you've been - for example this trail of a boat trip I took in Turkey last year.

If you have any suggestions for Mac GPS applications, I'd love to hear about them.

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This is the photo that caused me to take up photography as a hobby.

Being a gadget nut, I'd actually owned digital cameras since they first starting appearing on shelves in the high street stores. I had my first real job and I remember spending nearly a months wages on a fixed focus Fuji, and then only being able to take 8 photos at at a time because I couldn't afford the smartmedia memory card until the following month. Those photos were mainly of friends, and it was amazing to me as I didn't have to spend money at Boots after a night out, and get half my shots back with little stickers telling me how bad my photos were.

I kept that Fuji for years, eventually replacing it with a Sony Cybershot U-20. A tiny camera that I really could take anywhere. It had the smallest screen, a fixed focus and no controls except a shutter release - but it took a surprisingly good snapshot.

Then I got my first 'real' digital camera - a Kodak LS633. I'd picked it up cheaply in a sale. I didn't really know anything about it as a camera, but it had stuck in my mind for two reasons. First it was the first consumer product to use a OLED screen (as I said - gadget nut), and secondly it came with Mac software. Something that really was a rarity in those days.

I loved the screen, which was excellent and having a camera with zoom was a revelation. But most important of all was it produced these rich colour saturated images that made me feel like I was better then I really was.

Within a week of getting the camera, I was off on holiday with my friends. A real road trip down through France into Aquitaine, and staying in a villa around 40km from Bordeaux.

I got the bug bad that holiday, taking photos of everything in sight. A quick look in Lightroom shows nearly 900 images taken that week alone - I'd taken 550 in the entire two years previously.

On one of the days, we went into Bordeaux itself. Near where we parked they have this stunning war memorial. An angel atop a column, surrounded by fountains and marble statues. That is where this photo was taken. I remember 'chimping' at the screen and an being rather impressed with myself. I knew instantly it was the best photo I'd ever taken, and spent rather a long time that day trying to better it around Bordeaux.

It was the first time I really thought about framing a subject. A vast improvement on my previously snatched shots. When we got back to the villa I couldn't wait to see it on my iBook's screen. I didn't do any kind of processing then, I didn't really know how other then to stick the saturation levels up in iPhoto! But as I say, the bug was caught and I learned how to make improvements using a computer, and that over-saturation wasn't the answer to everything.

So this was the photo that lead to me buying a camera with a few more controls. Which lead to a camera that had manual controls. After a lot of experimentation, but a surprisingly short amount of time, that lead on to an SLR. After which the dizzying world of lenses, filters and speedlights came calling together with evenings sitting on the West Coast, listening to Terry Pratchett novels on my iPod just waiting for the sun to hit the horizon and hoping that that some colour will appear in the sky before it sets for the night.

So I did what any sane person would do in freezing cold weather - I grabbed my camera and went for a walk.

Remind me to buy a pair of wooly gloves. The old fingers were a little cold by the end of it.

Even the bike was covered. So glad I didn't have to ride into work today.

The full set is up on

These are my favourite photos of this year. They aren't the best technically or artistically but these are the ones that bring back the best memories and thats what its all about.

Another good night out, plenty of drink was flowing including these lethal cocktails.

So what else is there to do when your waiting for your flight? On the red-eye? On a stag weekend? The best part was the expressions of the other travelers.

Are you coming to the activities Jim. Are you sure? You feeling OK? Alright then, we'll just leave this bin here in case you need to puke.

As if being rolled down a hill in an inflatable ball filled with water isn't bad enough, they gave Steve and Jeff's ball an extra special touch.

Steves fancy dress birthday party. Jim's fake 'tash ended up at Glenn's fake eyebrows.

Steve and Gina's wedding was coming up quickly, I had a brand new lens that I'd been trying to dial myself in with and I hadn't managed to take even a semi-decent picture with it. So when this one came out OK, I was so relieved. Now that lens is one of my favourites.

I'd been more then a little worried about the formal shots after the ceremony, so I was very glad to get this one.

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Gina and Miriam at the reception.

Stu and Esthers co-ordination lets them down momentarily at the reception, but they recovered and it all turned out alright in the end.

Poor Thu, shes not a drinker. But she'll always find a comforting shoulder to rest on.

The thing about photographs is that they often provide no context, and they freeze a single moment in time. Sometimes that moment is just when your pulling a funny face, and the resulting image will take a 1,000 words to explain. Six of those words are usually "It's not what it looks like".

The morning after, Esther has absolutely no recollection of doing this.

Possibly the best picture I took in 2008

I'm of the belief that we aren't meant to spend our days in an office. This is much more like it - laying back on beanbag chairs on a beach in Turkey, watching a blood red moon set accompanied by a cocktail and your friends.

A Turkish nightclub really isn't then best place to catch a quick nap.

A great night out. 3 am in a Karaoke bar in Olu Deniz. Luckily enough I was still able to hold the camera straight enough for this one.

Jim completes a karoke performance that can best be described as 'energetic'.

I didn't take this one, but I'll include it anyway. Stupidly hot temperatures were combatted with waster pistols, hosepipes and buckets of water. Note Stu's missing cowboy hat - I wonder what happened to that?

Chilling out in the back of the jeep with a couple of beers after the jeep safari.

I just wanted to get one decent shot of the Eurofighter, so was really please to get this one.

For some crazy reason I decided that I'd sit outside for the entire crossing to Sark. I curled up in this little gap watching the waves breaking over the bow and going straight over my head. I stayed surprisingly dry and had a laugh doing so. When the seas appeared to calm, Jim came out and within a second or two he was wetter then I was. I was also shocked how well this came out considering it was taken on a mobile phone!

Sark was great this year. We got amazing weather for September and it was really nice to have everyone together again.

I bought a crappy screw in macro lens for my Nikon 50mm, the results were far too soft overall, but some parts of the image were nice and sharp. I can't remember when I first saw this technique, but its a style I like - taking a single image and applying a few different processes to it resulting in slightly surreal images.

I bought a new camera this year, called the Panasonic Lumix DMc-LX3. It more then anything else has got me taking photos again. One of the things it does superbly is make these great black and white images even in low light. I just love the lighting in this image.

Another example of a black and White image taken with the LX3. I love the way that this turned out, even considering that I was literally sat on my vespa, helmet still on, and taking this parked at the side of the road. Sometimes you get lucky.

He's a photogenic little bugger isn't he!