Essential free thing!…

The Photographer's Euphemeris – http://photoephemeris.com

I'd planned to write a short "Essential Kit" post about always taking a decent map and navigation compass when you're venturing into the more remote parts of the great outdoors. As you've probably worked out, these posts are aimed at directing towards the small things that can be really useful while you're out shooting, rather than straight camera or lens reviews (I'm not remotely qualified for this so if you're after reviews of lenses and camera bodies - there are plenty of magazines already doing this). My angle is to point out the little things that can either help you get that great image or make the getting of it more comfortable.

The one piece of solid gold advice I do have though, is if you want to capture stunning images - be prepared to actually go places in order to get them! This may sound ridiculous, but most people think they can just stumble into their own yard and shoot something that encapsulates the awesome spectacle of nature - then afterwards, can't for the life of them figure out why their pictures are all crap. If you want great landscape images - go places!

So with that in mind, my advice this post was to suggest that, in planning to visit a site of interest, it's always good to take a quality map (in the UK that would be an OS landranger map) that would both help you to navigate to your site and more importantly - tell you how the light would fall at a set time. For instance - if you drive to the east coast of england to shoot a seascape - a dawn shoot is probably going to be better looking out to sea etc. Then, during the week I stumbled on the free software above that takes all the work out of that for you - introducing the "Photographer's Euphemeris".

This is a really great - FREE - tool that takes the guesswork out of planning where you need to be at what time. It calculates the rising and setting trajectories of the moon and sun for any site you request, and also gives you the times for a set date (you can plan in advance). It even adjusts for seasonal fluctuations.

As I said, it's downloadable free from their site and there are windows (32 & 64 bit), Mac OS, i-pad and i-phone versions available. I took the mac version and it's a great, simple tool to use. You can view the maps as a graphic (think google maps), satalite view (google earth) or a combination of both so you get the 3D view with the place names.

I'm planning a couple of trips to the lake district soon and I'll definitely be pre-planning a few sites using this data.

Ideally, perceived wisdom is that we all visit a site first to "recce" it out before returning to shoot. In the real world, nobody has the time or the petrol money, so any preparation in advance is going to give you a greater chance of success - and this is an excellent free resource - download it now!

PS. Take a map anyway - nothing works better than a map when you're lost!