Hello photographer. In this video I would like to show you how you can use a little application on your iPhone in order to manage to sunlight in your photo shoots. There’s something I found in a blog over here. It’s blog titled, “Life in Lofi”: iPhoneography and the people behind this blog they love iPhones and photography just like me. That is why I really like the blog. We have Sunlight Tracker free for a limited time and that is a biggie.
Why that? Because once you go outside and shoot outside then sunlight is the dominant factor in your shoot, right? Usually I want to have the sunlight behind my subject acting as a room light but then I have to place the subject right in the way so that the sun is behind her. I cannot move the sun somewhere. I have to adjust to the sun and the same goes for my speed light. You need to set them up so that they just compete with the sun and I cannot dial up the sun or dial down the sun. No, it’s just not possible yet.
So the sun is a dominant factor especially when it comes to things like sunset photos. I need to know where the sunset. Let’s say I want to choose beach. We have a couple of beaches around and I want to have sunset photos. I want to know on which beach the sunset will be right at the horizon in the sea so that the beach is still straight towards sunset. I want to know exactly at what time it is because I only got like 10 minutes to shoot that photo. Then afterwards the sun plunged into the water. So I have to plan around the sun and the sunset and this is what I can do with this little application. It’s just beautiful. Let’s have a look at the application.
The application is living right here on my head phone. See sun, sunlight and it says in my current location, the twilight is at 6 a.m. and sunrise 6:30, sunset 6:18 p.m. That’s all fine but the really cool thing is to MapYou. Now the MapYou, it tries to locate me and yeah it was soon pretty exact. This is a tall, beating skyscraper over here. I'm right now in this skyscraper and it shows me the sunrise was over there and the sunset will be over there. Right now I had early sunset. Now the sun comes from here. Yeah, that is really good.
But there’s something I can pretty much see when I look out of the window .The cues is this. Let’s say it would be now 10 in the morning and I know at 4 p.m. my good friend then will come and we’re going to make some scene of photos and I want to go down to the surroundings of the building and I want to shoot her over there. Let’s say in the street café or in the park. Now at 10 in the morning I can look up where will the sun be at 4. Now let’s put it over here so at 4 the sun is coming exactly from over here.
So if we want to go to the shady side of the of the building, then we should find the location right over here and so now I could go down and search exactly a location which will work at 4 p.m. and which will make our shoot later on so much smoother but that’s not all.
Red clothing is over here, how about locations. Let’s say day after tomorrow I have gone to shoot and let’s say my hometown of Düsseldorf. So let’s add the location of Dusselfdorf. Options, search locations and go for Düsseldorf which is an awesome location to shoot but only if I really match the sunlight and voila. There we go, really fast see this. Oh nice, river of Rhine floating. Let’s save the location and let’s call it Düsseldorf. We would really like a good term that would do, north. So it’s safe and I never have to search for it again and the application will now if I select Düsseldorf it tells will me exactly the same things about the sunlight and then where it’s coming from, about my location Düsseldorf now over there. It also got some other information like the Azimuth which is the angle. Oh, yeah that is the geeky thing. It’s pretty much the angle between where the sun is and where the horizon is.
So it will get smaller when I reached the sunset and that might be, it’s not advanced topic like important if you shoot. If you are planning to shoot pretty much wide angle scenes then you want to know do I catch the sun, do I not catch the sun. You want to you’re your head around that before so you don’t end up at location and say, “Oh, it’s looking old crap.” So yeah, I think you’ve got the idea about this application and I hope you understand why I think that one is really biggie.
So far, if you wanted to do such things you, I have a head to cope with applications which have some flaws. Or you would go for the industry stand up something like they would use in Hollywood which is sunsets for instance but one cost quite some bucks. Now we’ve got it on the iPhone and it says currently it’s for free for a limited time. Now I don’t know what limited time means but if I where you and if you have got an iPhone I would be go into the App Store and download it to the access. It’s in the US App Store that’s no big deal. I'm right now in Beijing and I’ve got a German iPhone. It finds the application directory when I will search for sunlight space check up. I already found it, quick download it for free and install it. Now we go it’s running. Alright that’s it for today. Like always I wish you a lot of fun in your photo shoot and good light. Bye.
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