Lessons

Lesson Info

Essential Apps and Websites Part 1

I want to talk about a few of the websites that I go to when I'm thinking about going out shooting when I'm trying to keep track of particular subject matter like where I might want to shoot and just what we can do without in general so there's a website that I use quite often that is called ever places it's ever places dot com now every places is not designed to keep track of locations for a photographer instead is designed to discover places that people go like restaurants and other things I don't use it at all for its design purpose I use it for my purpose which is keeping track of any location I want to photograph so any time I hear about a location I put it into this website called ever places when I first get to the website it looks like this in this tells me right here in my places I have six hundred and one of locations that I'm keeping track of on this website called ever places any time I'm talking to somebody and they tell me about an interesting place to photograph and I wa...

nt to remember where it isthe then I grab my phone because there's also an iphone version of this I hit add place and I start asking them okay what city was that or where was that in general in they give me some details they say o talk to bob he owns the place and here's his phone number I start typing it right into my iphone in saving the place on this website called ever places so I've done that for over six hundred locations and then when I first get in here it would usually show me the ones that I've saved most recently here I've blurred the photos because these aren't my photos the's air other people's photos because these air locations I have not yet to shoot and uh so I could look at him on a map and I can pick different icons to use for various categories unfortunately you can't edit the categories there predefined because remember this is not designed for photographers to keep track of locations instead this is designed for you to discover like restaurants and other things in so you'll see when I get to the categories there's a fixed group of categories and I just generically assign I don't remember if one of us one of them is food or something like that I'll sign that tell my finished gas stations and then one looks like a tree you sign that all national parks it just so I can visually see the difference so in this particular case all the yellow icons are vintage gas stations that I've researched and I want to go out and shoot so here's what happens when I click on the category these air that pre defined categories and they simply to determine which icon is placed on the map and so I've used this one at the top for finished gas stations I've used this one for literally architecture er nature's for national parks and so on just so I can differentiate them then I can view them in different ways if you look in here at this area right up here I can view them on a map which he already saw his little icons I convene them as a list where it would give me a little bitty picture and then the name or I can view them as a gallery which would give me big pictures and the name and then what I'm viewing them if I am viewing them on the map if I click on one of those icons it will bring up ah small little thing that shows me in the picture that I've assigned to it and the name and if I click on the little link that was in the lower right called view this comes up and lets we have information about it so in this particular case um well here's what it would look like if I actually told to edit that information you could put in the address up here this could be gps coordinates or you can type in the name of a city where an actual address you can move that around by clicking on this icon to place it somewhere else if you don't know the exact location but you khun guess to mate then you have your name you can pick your category here and you can also have collections and those you can define yourself so I have a collection for things have already shot so if I want to mention things to other people I can just look at the things I've shot versus things I have not yet and I can make a collection for a nap coming tripp like okay here's my florida adventure I'll tag all the things I think I want to shoot in a collection you can add notes tags are like keywords so you could search by those and you can add multiple photographs now this little checkbox called private means will other people be able to see this on the internet if they just search for that location your you're assigned I have mind set to private because I'm using this to keep track of locations I want to shoot I'm not using this to share everything with everybody else had already shot all these locations they're all my own photographs in here in the information I have typed in would be useful for people discovering locations then I might turn off the private checkbox let other people discover them here's what the iphone app looks like when I'm viewing it as a map so I n a saying all right I'm flying to seattle today I'll go over here and I'll zoom up in the seattle area and I'll see what have I tagged for this general area where I might have heard of it before and want to shoot it on this particular trip then I could get directions and do other things based on what we have there but this is ever places dot com it's both a website and it's an iphone app and that's what I use for keeping track of locations anytime I hear of any location I grab my iphone and I added through that or if I find out about it online I do it right from my browser and ever places dot com it's a free service and I find it to be really nice for keeping track of locations any questions about that site it looks very cool yeah but not a ton of questions quite yet okay that's fun but we'll keep you posted sounds good so just say no over on the left side my places would show you all of your locations or you can narrow it down by category by tag which is the key words that you've done or by city I find by city not to be useful because it doesn't divide things up by state so it's just gonna be an alphabet old coal list of cities all right mother websites and aps that I use that I find to be overly useful there's another one that is called road trippers road trippers is an app that allows me to save a route that I'm going to take let's say that I'm going to do a five day uh trip and I'm going to go to national parks in utah and maybe arizona well I could go into road trippers at road trippers dot com and I can come in and add is many stops as I would like on a trip just like he might do in a google map search or something like that but what it will do then is it will show me the various stops that I've put in in this case it would be one two three and maybe down here for four and then you can tell it how far away from that route you might want to deviate and you see this little kind of purplish almost like a thick border around that route what is going to do is it's going to search through that area of the country and tell you about things like you khun tell it to tell you about accommodations food nature so here I can come in and say I want to know about national parks I want to know about lakes and forests were other subject matter you could tell it to tell you about odd america kind of things they're going to be near that route historic locations all that kind of stuff and so if I know I'm going to take a particular route I put my route in road trippers to keep track of it you can save your trips once you have it in there so I can access it on my iphone because they have a free iphone app is well it will remind me where's my next stop I'm supposed to go to you could also change the order of your stops very quickly by clicking and dragging uh to rearrange them and so I might put in here ten different stops I want to make like let's say ten vintage gas stations that I know are in between atlanta where my bus is currently parked in florida where I'm going next I'll put in the end the location of all of those and then I can drag them up and down on the list and it will re calculate my route so I could try to figure out the best route to cover all of them you know what order should I do them in then I come in here and tell it hey how far am I willing to deviate from that route and it will tell me about all sorts of other things that are around me that I might want to go on shoot another app that I use are actually website that I use to figure out what I might want to shoot is I showed a lot of vintage america which is like old finished gas stations movie theaters diners that kind of stuff but there is a website called roadside america in roadside america will tell you about a lot of odd and off beat tourist attractions and sometimes they're also some vintage america related sites and I will go in and look at it is well whenever I'm thinking about going to a location and it's going to tell me any kind of interesting things that are going to be in the general surroundings of bright go it also has an on iphone app that I think it's just called roadside and with it I when I'm in any location I havent been in before I just ask you to tell me what's around me and it will tell me about all sorts of interesting locations and so those are some of the web sites that I use but what I do in general before I go to a particular location is if I know I'm going to go to a recognizable place like let's just say a national park I end up scouring the internet to do research the first thing I'll do is I'll go to flicker you know flickers where you get all those photos I'll type in the name of the national park and I look at what's coming up and I look at what's visually interesting to me are there certain waterfalls that are there are there other features that are there and I'm just going to see what are people shooting in what really attracts me I'll start taking notes oftentimes their comments on the photos that tell me the names of various waterfalls and things and also what I'm trying to do is figure out what do I have to beat what do I have to improve upon compared to what other people are doing so I'll say this is the best of what I've seen out there now when I go there I got to do better than all this and that's kind of my mindset sometimes that gives me ideas about angles to shoot from that I might not have considered before because somebody's been there many times before my have and they've explored the surroundings and I haven't done that yet also go to a website called interest dot com pinterest is where people pin photographs usually a lot of products and fashion and things but I find people on lee pin usually really cool looking photos if you search for national parks they're not usually photographers pinning things instead their consumers and so you find whatever it consumers air interested on pinterest dot com if you want to see what I'm interested look me up on pinterest dot com just search for my name then wilmore and you can search by people and you'll see I think I have almost six thousand followers there so I've been some interesting stuff uh but other things that I look up for when I'm researching this site there are a bunch of little lapse on my iphone that are useful ah one of those apse is a weather app if I'm out in the field I want to know is it going to be raining in the next five minutes is it going to be raining twenty minutes from now when I get to my location then I use an app for me actually it's called weather dot I think I owe although I could be wrong in the ending of it and I will find out and let you know we'll put it in the notes but what it does is it tells me where I am this is what I did earlier yesterday it tells me what the current temperature is and it gives me a prediction here here it says it's going to drizzle for ten minutes it will often say it's going to drivel drizzle for twelve minutes and it will stop six minutes later what it does at the bottom of his that's expecting any kind of rain or precipitation in general is it will give you down here an estimate of how heavy it thinks it's going to be from light rain medium and heavy and what will happen is this little black area will undulate in the mauritz undulating the less certain they are so it's undulating a lot you're like yeah they think it could be this but it might not and if it's not undulating at all they're really certain that it's going to be that particular forecast and it gives me that for the next hour can I just chime in I think it's forecast bio forecast on io is this app and then I can click on the bottom where it says next seven days and that brings up a list of a seven day forecast on the seven day forecast it shows in my highs lows in an icon for the weather but what's nice about it that most other aps don't do is if you tap on any one of these days it comes down and gives you more detail it will tell you what it actually thinks it's going to be like throughout the day you can scroll horizontally across this and it will tell you that it thinks it's going to be overcast between two and four that kind of stuff usually only get that kind of information for today instead of getting it for five days later it's also nice that it's going to tell me the sunrise and sunset times a cz well so I can plan for that and also in the ipad version of this app you can also look up dates in the future or in the past and it'll give you either what the weather was back at a particular point or it will try to guess what the weather will be so if you have a trip coming up you know it's going to be in august and it's going to be in florida or something like that you can look up what it thinks the weather will be like so at least you have an idea of high and low temperatures in what it is on average but that's the app I find that I like a lot for weather I actually use that one a lot ben for on wedding days leading up to the wedding day so I know what I'm getting myself into yeah uh all right let's look at a couple others here do you ever wanna talk about that gps that I put in the top of my camera hot shoe well that thing costs a lot of money it's like two hundred some bucks which I think is ridiculous for gps I think this should be more like fifty bucks there should be built into my camera in the first place but there are other alternatives your iphone if you have one has a gps built into it it's what's known as an assisted gps though which means it first needs to have a cell signal to figure out where it is in general and as long as it had a cell signal since you've last turned it on it can keep them the gps location even if the cell signal goes away but it needs one to start with um but in this app which I have to look at the name of it I'm sorry I have to look at my notes here ah look at it in a minute to find out the actual name but what it ends up doing is it keeps track of what time it is and where you are and it just does that well you're out shooting so every a few seconds sometimes it could be about thirty seconds it will keep track of where you are again and just write down the gps location each time you composite if you're going to go have lunch and you don't want it to be taking up a lot of time are you going to get on a plane or something and then you can un pas it and it's going to constantly keep track of where you are let's hold on a second then this is what it looks like when you first started up by the way you can start a new trip just by clicking that and you can tell it how often it is going to keep track of your location if you want it like every thirty seconds or every five minutes depending on how really how precise you need it it's going to take up a little more battery life if you're gonna have it do it every thirty seconds compared every five minutes that type of stuff but after you're done keeping track your location with this all you do is you tell it that you're done and it shows you this you take your camera you pointed out your phone and you take a picture of this and if you take a picture of this then what's happening is it's looking at what time that photo was taken to know what the clock was set to on your camera and there's an app that you can get for this that will sync up the data that your iphone captured with that photograph that is on your camera and it's going to make it so you don't have to make sure that the two clocks are in sync instead you can um have it do it automatically and it will take all your photographs which I think could be great but I think it is an interesting solution it's not very expensive it's only a couple bucks and it replaces this two hundred fifty dollars item that would be at the top of my camera all you need to do is start her up and when you're done having it track it you take a photograph with your camera of your iphone screen and then it's going to be able to sink the two up automatically when you use their uh ap any questions about that concept not yet but what what's your best use for that when you're trying to sink well my best use for I mean the main thing is now if I sink this up with all the images that I shot yeah and then I import those images into a program like light room light room has a map module if I click on the map module suddenly I can see where all those photographs were taken in therefore I don't have to uh to find my images I don't have to look through all the folders to find them I can just look at the map and zoom up on whatever area remember exploring like all the pictures I took in florida let's say and keep zooming up on the map I see little bidding points on the map telling me where each photo was taken and it's a much easier way to find certain images where you might not remember the name of the location or the date that you shot it or anything else which is usually what you have tagged to your folder names and your file names but instead it just gives you another method for be able to find them so I think it's a rather nice also thank you yeah all right other apse that I find to be useful when it comes to working at night let's say or planning a trip that might happen at night a couple different this is one I think it's called villa o clock yeah I feel a clock when we look it up you think I have it here yeah v e l o clock one word what it does is it tells me when will the sun be up that's pretty easy to figure out if they have sunrise and sunset times but what it also tells me is if you look at this little bar this represents the day the little triangle that's near the end right now is what time it would be right now so this is right now I happen to take this last night so it was late at night and this little bar here represents what will be happening with the sun and moon so sunrise is right here and this is when the sun is up then here is sunset right there and then you have the different levels of twilight first there's a level of twilight when it's really bright out and you can still see your surroundings easily then there's the time of twilight right here when the sky is still blue but it's dark out it's like when you do like painting or if you want to shoot a lot of neon signs and still the blue sky well it tells me when that's gonna happen and then this is when the sky will be black all the way around here until it starts to get near sunrise we're here it's still going to be dark out but we'll have a blue sky here it's going to be bright out and we'll have a blue sky but the sun's not up yet then we got sunrise there's your like your golden hour in there and then we have her son the little white line is when the moon will be up and so I just find that to be a nice of visual way to tell a lot of information in a little bitty area where I don't have to think about numbers instead I can look at me which is this triangle how far away am I from the time when the sky is going to turn blue how far away am I from when the sun's gonna rise and when is the moon going to come up in set so I put like that down here at the bottom it will tell you sunrise and sunset times moonrise moons moons at times and it'll also show you the phase that the moon is in s so you can good idea good idea of it but this is a website or not a website I app called villa o clock it's v e l o clock all one word if you want to know what the moon phase will be because the moon's face is important when you're shooting at night if you want to capture the stars in the sky like the milky way in the sky you don't want the moon up there making the sky too bright you want to keep the sky really nice and dark and so the time to do that is when you have a new moon or when the moon is just is not going to be full so I can pull this up it's a calendar I can quickly slip through the mountain months and say well this general timeframe here from thirty first through about the fifth be a pretty good time to shoot those stars because the sky will be nice and dark where the moon won't be there I could also look at when's it gonna be a full moon if I want to include the moon in my shot or if I want the moon toe light the scene but do along enough exposure the moon khun like the scene and so I find this to be overly useful when it comes to planning out a trip you know I'm going to go to a national park and I'm gonna have a full moon out where I can go out at night to a long exposure and get everything lit or am I gonna not have any moon where I could get nice stars maybe some star trails and things had been just wanted jumpin really quickly yes the last out the year we were working we were googling over here vila clock I'm sorry v l a okay c l o c k thanks apologize for right and wrong no were unjustly know the gps app that I showed you earlier I finally saw my note here it's called gps the number four then the word cam gps the number four and the word cam and I think there might be a normal version and a pro version I had the pro version perfect and a lot of these that we're looking at are for the iphone but people can google for whether they have android or whatever smaller find equivalents you know sometimes it's not going to be the exact same map sometimes it's just the same concept made by someone else but the main thing is if you're aware that something exists the concept of it then you can search and find the best for your particular platform I happen to use an iphone so that's what I'm happening toe to show you a terrific thank you yeah here is one other one this one I believe is called dark sky but be careful they're too dark sky apse one of them has to do with weather in one of them does not that I'm using the one that has nothing to do with the weather but this is dark sky in what it tells me is where there will be light pollution meaning if you ever want to capture the stars in the sky the milky way that kind of stuff you need the sky to be dark in the more you have city lights in there too brightening up everything the harder it's going to be to do that in so when I bring up this app called dark sky it shows me where I am which is the blue dot and then these various colors tell me how much light pollution there's going to be in that area and if you're anywhere near seattle there's so many buildings in downtown and all the houses and everything it's in the red zone where it's not going to be great for capturing the milky way in the sky but if I venture out I can either go towards the coast and I can see where it's going to start getting really dark in the sky at night over in this portion where there's not a lot of light pollution or I could move up this way to find it and so I find dark sky to be really nice if you ever do any night photography and you want to include things like the um the milky way without this app though I'm just going to be randomly wondering you know is the area that I'm thinking about going to going to be dark enough to really get a nice good dark sky to get those stars or I just show up and I'm like oh bummer this isn't gonna work out but with this app I can figure out how far I'm going to move and you can look at any part of the country with this school around and all that