As I've said here on several occasions, photography is important for me when I'm planning a book. I take lots of photos before I start and refer to them constantly while I'm writing. They help me set the feel and tone of the story and remind me of what I wanted to achieve when, months later, I'm hard at work in England.

But there's a problem with all these photos. It's called filing. I am the world's worst filer. I have photos that look lovely and potentially useful were it not for the fact I don't actually know where they were taken. Wouldn't it be good if the camera did that geographic filing for me?

<!--more-->I think so. A couple of years ago, while writing <em>The Fallen Angel</em>, I bought a Nikon camera with GPS. It took lovely pictures. The GPS capabilities were appalling. It took ages to get a location fix and frequently lost it. It soon became a present for the son (he gets most of my old cameras).

But time moves on. Now I'm in Florence with another GPS-equipped camera. A <em>hybrid</em> GPS camera if you will. It's brand new, called the Casio EX-H20G and cost me £249.99 tax free at Gatwick, £100 less than some places sell it for on the High Street. It's a modest looking, slightly chunky upmarket 14 megapixel point and shoot and looks like this...

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-11-421.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6735" title="Casio EX-H20G" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-11-421.png" alt="" width="490" height="329" /></a>

The GPS is a bit out of the ordinary. It does the standard thing of picking up location from satellites. But then, as far as I understand it, the thing also has an internal motion sensor. So once you lose sight of the satellite, by going indoors for example, the camera works out where you are itself (don't ask for details -- I don't know either). It also comes with a built-in map system covering the whole world. This means you can view where your pictures were taken on the camera itself using a map (and find out your present position too). And it has a database of popular cities and destinations such as Florence, which allow it to tag well-known places automatically and suggest places for you to visit (if you want that).

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/santa-croce-night-0011.jpg"><img class="alignright size-large wp-image-6736" title="Santa Croce night" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/santa-croce-night-0011.jpg?w=640" alt="" width="262" height="349" /></a>Unlike the Nikon it seems to have an incredibly long battery life too. Does the geotagging work? Oh yes. Here's a photo I took of the basilica of Santacroce at night (without flash I should say, the slight blurring is probably hand-held camera movement). Click on the image to see the full size picture unretouched.

I'm not going to talk image quality here. I wouldn't expect the Casio to be as good as the more expensive Ricoh cameras I used last year in Venice for <em>The Plague Doctor. </em>It's much more an everyday point and shoot model than they are. And frankly quality is not <em>that</em> important to me. I photograph all kinds of things that most people wouldn't bother with -- street detail, rubbish, signs, nameplates. This is for research not a photo album.

No, it's the location information that interests me. If I pull those photos into any common photo app, be it Picasa or iPhoto (here it's Aperture) I see this...
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-02-201.png"><img class="aligncenter" title="Photo map" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-02-201.png" alt="" width="490" height="384" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align:left;">Pinpoints for all the places I've taken pictures and an easy way to see how many are at each location. The naming of the photos as Santa Croce was done by the camera by the way, not me. It has the main Florence sights listed in its database of locations. All I did was point and shoot. This is good.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">Another remarkable thing the camera does (if you apply a new update from Casio and make sure you format your SD card too) is keep recording GPS data when it's turned off. Even when it's in a pocket. I mooched around Florence yesterday seeing a variety of interesting things. When I got home I saved my GPS information as a kml file, the kind used by Google Earth. When I pulled in there I saw where I walked. Unfortunately Earth seems to stick a distracting label on every one of the many waypoints. So it's easy to see this by uploading that same file to the free <a href="http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/" target="_blank">GPS Visualiser</a> service. Here were yesterday's peregrinations when I was out with the camera, which was mostly turned off and inside a jacket pocket.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;"><a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-05-51.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6738" title="Track" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-18-at-09-05-51.png" alt="" width="490" height="480" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align:left;">That snail trail of marks is pretty accurate, though I didn't actually wander into the river Arno at any stage. As a research tool this is, I have to say, incredibly useful. I can fire away and have an automatic record of the photo location.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">The big test for the internal motion sensor comes later today though when I walk through the Vasari Corridor. This is a private passageway built for the Medicis which runs all the way from the Uffizi on the north bank of the Arno, across the top of the Ponte Vecchio and comes out in the gardens of the Pitti Palace on the south bank. All of it indoors.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">Will my clever little camera be able to handle that? We'll see. And as to picture quality... I will put up a single Florence gallery on Flickr at the end of this week so you can all judge. I think it takes very nice if unremarkable photos though. Here's a close up with lots of zoom of the Adam and Eve panel from the Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;"><a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/gates-001.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-6739" title="Gates 001" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/gates-001.jpg?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="480" /></a>Not an easy subject given the people around these doors, and the zoom copes very well. More later when I've taken this thing through the Medici's corridor...</p>