I began my full-time job 7 months ago, two months after I graduated college. In the last 7 months, I have made plenty of business trips to New York and San Francisco, and two trips back home to see my parents in Vancouver. I have been thinking about perhaps taking 1 month off work to go on my next big trip abroad or just taking a few days to go on a beach vacation, but I haven't made even the slightest action towards it. I am happy at work - I feel challenged and motivated, I like the people I work with and I am good at my job. But a part of me missing the thrill of being on the road - not knowing what the next day would look like or where I would end up the week after. I miss breathing in every new country and taking the first step on foreign soil.

I have never understood the popularity of travel quotes on posters until now. It is about feeling inspired.  Today I begin a new photography project: Postcards from the Road. I'm going to take the top 50 most popular travel quotes according to Matador and turn them into posters by using my images. I hope the process of finding these quotes and complementary images refresh my excitement towards travel every time I work on this project. And I hope viewing the images and the quotes bring you just as much inspiration.

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign." - Robert Louis Stevenson 

I was born in Beijing and lived in China for 11 years. After I moved to North America, I still returned to China frequently and travelled extensively throughout Beijing as well as its southern provinces Hunan and Yunnan. I know the country well and have advised friends on travel itinerary throughout China on many occasions. Having once called this country home, I still feel very drawn to it and want to introduce it to as many people as possible. Here are two basic itinerary for those wanting to visit China.

1) Want to hit up the most developed cities in China, visit the tourist attractions and hiking the Great Wall of China? Then going to the Chinese capital followed by a trip to Shanghai is a must, but why not also stop by Nanjing - one of the earliest established cities in China - and check out the scenery along the way.

Itinerary: Beijing > Shanghai > Nanjing
Photos and details of my trip below:

Hiking The Great Wall of China
A Photo Tour of Beijing
A Photo Tour of Pudong, Shanghai
Highlights From The World Exposition 2010 in Shanghai, China



2) If you'd like to get away from the touristy places and get to the more tropical regions for a quiet vacation and enjoy the scenery  then head south to Yunnan and Hunnan province. There you'll find Lijiang - the Venice of China - and some beautiful landscapes.

Itinerary: Kunming > Dali > Lijiang > Changsha > ZhangJiaJie National Forest Park
Photos and details of my trip below:

The Real Mountains of Avatar
Snapshots from Yunnan, China
My Lijiang
A Forest of Stone in Kunming China
A Day in Dali, Yunnan
Photos from Suburban Changsha
Chinese Traditions of a Cemetery Visit

Long time readers may be surprised by a new design when they visit the site this week. After many years of running a travel photography blog hosted on Wordpress.com, I have made the long-awaited switch to Blogger. While there were many kinks with the transition, like importing old blogs, dealing with lost comments, and fixing broken links, it was a very important change for many reasons. 

Why Wordpress.com just didn’t cut it anymore 

I had purchased the custom domain of JustInTimeTravels.com and mapped it to Wordpress.com, I also paid to have the ability to cusomize my CSS and display large photos at 750pxs wide. It those were not big financial investments, I had definitely put a lot of effort into my blog over the years to get it to where it was. Here are the main reasons for my leaving: 

• Poor analytics: Wordpress lacked strong analytics and the meaningful statistics that came with Google Analytics, and there was just no easy way to put Analytics on my Wordpress.com blog.

• Media bandwidth: Right before I made the switch, I had hit 98% of my media bandwidth on Wordpress. I suppose I uploaded too many high-resolution images. In order to keep uploading media, I was told that I had to pay additional money for an upgrade in bandwidth.

• Paid upgrades for just about everything: Between paying for domain mapping, CSS customization, and almost having to pay for a bandwidth upgrade, I was putting more money into the blog than I’d originally anticipated. The other blogging alternatives was simply cheaper and delivered equally good products and services.

• Inability to manage followers: This piece particularly bugged me. I had over 800 blog subscribers who followed me only through the Wordpress platform. This meant that they only saw my blog updates when they logged into their Wordpress accounts. There was no guarantee that those followers read my blog updates since it didn’t land in their email inbox or reach their RSS feed reader. I simply couldn’t manage their subscription in any way and I saw lots of fluctuations in follower count.

Why I chose Blogger over Wordpress.com

Blogger had checkmarks beside all the things that I didn’t like about Wordpress.com; here are the main benefits that I want to highlight:

• Support: The beauty of this open platform is the plethora of support and help articles available on the web about how to customize Bloggers with different widgets. While I could get some answers I needed from the Wordpress.com forums, nothing beats soaking up all the cool ideas from different Blogger Customization websites.

• Big images: As a photographer, the lack of (free) themes on Wordpress.com that supported large image display really annoyed me. I only worked around this by paying to have full CSS customization capability and forcing my blog posts to have a wider display despite the template restrictions. But on Blogger, I can set the blog width and choose to display larger images if I wanted - all without having to upgrade to a Premium Theme!

• Customization: Perhaps the biggest benefit of transitioning to blogger is the full customization. I could do anything I wanted, edit the CSS, add javascript here and there. Seriously, life is so good when you can customize.

• Integration with Google products: Ok, I may be a bit biased here but I love Google products - Analytics, Feedburner, AdWords, AdSense , Google+. With a blog on Blogger, all of that integrates smoothly. I can finally put Google Analytics on my blog, link it to the Webmaster Tool, and if I wanted to run ads one day, I could even link my Analytics to my Google Adwords. This is just a whole bunch of nerd talk for “friendlier integration with other key products!”

So Blogger will be the new home for this travel photography blog, I hope you stick around with us during this new phase of the blog and remember to follow along with the new email newsletter.

Over the new year, I got a new network drive that allows me to wirelessly backup my images when I am connected to my home network. It was a very exciting toy that +Alex Kennberg set up for me. Storing and backing up images is a big topic for photographers. I recently listened to a story from a friend who lost 2 years of images on her hard drive. As a creator of images, it’s painful to hear this happen to a fellow photographer and friend. And I’m sure it’s even more painful to experience it first hand.

Luckily, I have never lost an image due to storage or backup problems. Frankly, I’m paranoid about losing images and in this instance - unlike in most others - my paranoia has been a gift.

Home Storage and Backup
The RAW files from my camera gets downloaded to my computer, an external hard drive, and my wireless network storage. After editing images, I save a jpg and a psd version of edited images in all 3 locations. Every 10 days, I also run time machine on my Mac on another hard drive. Once I am done with my images and no longer need them on my laptop, I delete the files from my laptop.

At any point, I have 2 different sources where my images are stored: my external hard drive as primary storage, and wireless network as backup. At the very worst, I can also look into Time Machine to recover any files. If I had a studio office, I would also keep my hard drive at home and my network storage drive at the office. Yeah, didn’t I tell you I’m paranoid?

Storing and Backing up on the road

It’s trickier to store and backup images when I’m on the road as I don’t always have reliable Internet coverage to upload anything online. My routine on the road is to bring a portable external hard drive and as many memory cards as possible. I tend to shoot on different memory cards, label them by date, and backup all images on the hard drive. This way the images are available on the memory card as well as the hard drive. When I get home, I will immediately upload the images to my network drive.

There isn't unique technology that will always protect your images. Hard drives break, offices get flooded, and there’s always an element of human error. The only solution is to make sure your image files are available on different sources. It’s the best way to reduce your chance of losing a photograph.