Whenever we have a wedding booked for a new venue we always do a recce beforehand to search out good locations. One thing you can’t know accurately from these visits is where the light will be falling at a certain time of the day three months in the future. This problem was clearly illustrated at a recent pre-wedding shoot where the ideal site for many of the photographs was a fantastic formal garden. However, the garden is pretty exposed and south facing and thus for many parts of the day it is pretty unusable but if we knew when and where the sun would be we could plan our photography to make best use of this location.
There are Golden Hour calculators on the internet, that may be helpful but these are are only of limited use as they are more biased to showing when the Golden Hour is, not where the light will be at 10.30 on June 18th in Little Snoring, Worcestershire. As ever, there is an app that solves the problem.
Lighttrac is an app for both the iPad and iPhone that shows you the position and direction of sunlight at any given location and at anytime in the future (haven’t checked how far in the future but its enough for my use).
Lighttrac integrates with Googlemaps to display locations and allows you to search for sites by name, postcode and from you address book. Once you have your location you can zoom in and out using the usual finger movements.
Once you have put in the location you wish to find (Lighttrac will show your present location when it first starts) you can then set the time and date you wish to see using the standard flicky dials. The time of day is set using the blue scrubby slider at the bottom of the screen.
And voila, I now know that we aim to shoot after 3.20 the sun will have eased off and be at a good angle.
The app can also be used in landscape mode that hides some of the information, and you can also set the image to map mode.
There is one hiccough in my grand plan, the assumption that the British weather will be good. I like to be optimistic.
