I’ve always been fascinated by photo walks and it’s always something that I’ve wanted to either get more involved in or in fact organise myself.

This week we have dedicated the whole week to Photo Walks …. or rather we’ll be following my little journey in creating my own walk.

The first steps… (pun intended)

I didn’t just want to create a rough map and set up a meet-up group….. oh no… I had to make things more complicated for myself …. and to be honest far more geeky.

What I wanted was to somehow leave some sort of social media map around the landscape. I also didn’t want to have a set time or date that people could join in so I wanted it to be very easy for different people or organise their own walks on the same route.

Google Maps and Panoramio.com

I loved the idea that photographers can share their images of specific locations through these sites. For me, embracing these social networks was the first step in creating a photo walk that can be consumed on all sorts of different media.

FourSquare

It occurred to me that geo-tagging was going to play an important part and that FourSquare could play a vital role in mapping a route simply by using the phone application.

Twitter

If I was going to use FourSquare then it only made sense to use Twitter. What Twitter allows me to do is create a live stream for the walks that I am taking. There is also the ability to not only share the locations but also images taken via a camera phone.

Flickr

I’m not a massive user of Flickr but I guess I really should be! I knew at some point that each walk was going to need a place where photographers could share there images and Flickr was the obvious choice.

Publishing the images in print

As I wanted the images to exist in as many forms and the walks to be consumed in lots of different ways finding a publisher for the images seemed a natural step to take.

To keep things simple (and the costs down) I’ve been looking at different options that companies like Blurb and Lulu offer. I’d prefer to have a small book available that photographers could take out on the walks than loose prints or postcards.

Hosting a walk in person

One of the major things that had to be considered was how to promote the walks and when (or if) I’d be hosting a walk in person. Obviously this site is a nice platform but other websites such as Meet-Up offer a much wider audience.

Interaction

There is plenty of scope for interaction on all of the social networks used but there is of course a chance that I’ll alienate non-Flickr users etc. What I had to look for was a simple platform to promote the site and allow photographers to share their thoughts and images.

I had thought about using a WordPress site but due to the nature of what we needed Tumbr proved to be very handy.

Audio recordings

Sometimes I find it easier to explain myself in person and recordings whether they be video or audio was also going to play it’s part….. I am a podcaster after all!

I thought it might be a nice touch to have an audio accompaniment to the walk…. not so much a guided tour you see in museums but a mini podcast that is recorded at the time that the original walk was taken.