PhotoPills App
The Problem
Night photography is often easier when you’ve scouted your location in daylight. But when the sun is up, you can’t see nighttime things such as stars, the moon, the Milky Way, etc. It’s hard to plan a composition around elements you can’t see.
Night photography can also require lots of math—some of it hard. Even the simpler equations take time in the field, and the more complex ones involve algorithms that most people wouldn’t even understand, let alone be able to memorize or to calculate in the field.
The Solution
PhotoPills is a dynamic app that serves as an all-in-one solution to several of the problems we encounter in night photography, and it also eases some traditional scouting tasks and enables some we never would have thought possible even ten years ago.
The app helps with:
determining the location of the setting or rising sun, moon or Milky Way in any scene, anywhere in the world
when on location, visualizing right on screen exactly where celestial objects will be in the scene later
calculating long exposures based on shorter test exposures
determining and visualizing depth of field and hyperfocal distance
planning a shoot around a meteor shower, or a solar or lunar eclipse—any shower, any eclipse, any year, anywhere
calculating the best shutter speed to keep stars sharp based on any specific camera and lens combination
working out all the data needed to capture time-lapses of any length
and even more
PhotoPills works on Android or iOS devices. Using it on a phone is more portable and handy; using it on a tablet allows for more screen real estate, which in some cases allows the app to display data differently, making it easier to digest.
The Breakdown
WHEN THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT TOOL
If you’re looking for an at-home scouting tool that you can use on your desktop computer, PhotoPills doesn’t do that—try The Photographers Ephemeris instead.
Also, if you’re looking for a scouting app to master quickly, then PhotoPills might frustrate you—it’s a very powerful app, and with that power and large tool set comes a learning curve. You’ll want to invest time into mastering this.
WHEN THIS IS THE RIGHT TOOL
It’s an amazing tool for proactively planning more productive and consistently more successful on-location shoots based around anything going on in the sky—which pretty much describes any landscape photography. If you want to plan better, and plan better photos, then this app can help immensely.
