How often do you plan your photos or do you rather go with the flow. If you have never planned your shots, I’d suggest you try it with the tips I’m about to share with you.
Let’s get started!
Best planning app out there
There is one app that beats all other apps by a mile when it comes to planning. It has everything from Sun’s rotations to augmented reality and even astrophotography!
The app I am talking about is of course PhotoPills.
With PhotoPills you can see when and which direction the sun sets in a certain place and even how high the sun is. It even takes the altitude into factor.
You can also just use augmented reality mode to physically see where the sun is going to be at a certain moment with your camera. Really useful for photography.
As a bonus, PhotoPills also has very good astrophotography features.
All kinds of settings for your camera, star trails, meteor storms, moon phases and rotations and much more.
This is not an advertisement. I just really enjoy the app and use it almost every week.
Scout locations
First, you have to find where you want to go to take the photos. For this, we want to use a couple of tools:
Terrain Map
3D Map
A terrain map shows all of the paths and roads, as well as the height map but it’s difficult to imagine the landscape in your head.
This is where the 3D map comes in. There are many sites that have free 3D maps for you to use. With this you can already roughly see what the landscape looks like.
Check the weather
Next you need to check the weather.
You can use any weather app or provider for this but if you can use the radar map, it’s a huge bonus because you get much more detailed information.
Rain, temperature, clouds, fog are all important information that you need to take into account during your travel day.
Try to think about what kind of lighting is the sun and the weather going to provide together.
Think about interesting shots beforehand.
Take inspiration from others
This one is kind of obvious but I still wanted to include this one.
See where everyone’s travelling and what are they seeing. Is there anything interesting to your eyes you would like to photograph yourself?
Don’t directly copy others though. Take inspiration and think of how you could bring your own twist into the scene.
That’s it!
With these tips you can already roughly picture the final image in your head without even visiting the location.
I mostly plan my trips for longer trips like for my Norway trips.
I haven’t actually planned any photography spots with this for my Interrail trip but that is only because it’s kinda hard to predict where exactly am I going and when.
For that trip I’m just going with the flow and enjoying it.
Interrail trip will begin in six days as I'm writing this. I am in need of a long vacation and I’m finally going on one. So excited for the whole trip!
As I said last week, blog posts will continue as normal, but I might not be posting everyday on socials but we’ll see because I probably have bunch of free time on trains.
But for now, I’ll see you next week!
