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Essential Apps and Websites Part 2

another kind of app to look for is one that's going to tell you what's going on with the tides and if you just search on the app store for anything with word tied attached I'm not saying this is the best one everything think there's one called tied tools there's all sorts of tide calendars and tide charts this particular one is one where I believe the red line is the time current time innit tells you for your particular area when is it going to be high tide and when is it going to be low tide why the heck would you care well if you're going to go shooting on the beach and you want to get rocks in the foreground with waves splashing against them and things it's going to matter if that tide is coming in and you're at high tide you might not be able to see any of those rocks they might all be covered up with water and if you come there lower tide you might have it different situation to shoot but it would be really good to know what time of day would be best especially when you're scoutin...

g during the day time you're looking down on the beach and saying all those air cem cool rocks that I want to include in the foreground and you say okay I don't want to come back at high tide or low tide to get him and it also tells you when it's going to be daytime that's this area here where it says daylight and it's also going to tell me the moon when it's going to be up so if I want to use the moon to illuminate the scene it just gives me a nice visual of all of that which I think could be very useful and let's see this is called tied tracker tied tracker but there are many other acts that are similar you might find one that's either free or lower priced or has a better visual uh that kind of thing is just a concept that I find to be useful so let's say I'm thinking about a particular location and let's say that location has a waterfall do you remember when I talked about waterfalls I said it's best to shoot him in the shade when the sun's not directly hitting them how the heck can I figure out when is the sun not going to be in a waterfall without going there and looking at it let's say I'm planning my trip I know there's a major waterfall I would like to capture and I need to find out what time of day am I going to go shoot it well if you go to google earth google earth you khun download as an app or I believe you could also use it in some web browsers it will allow you to zoom up on any location pretty much on earth and see it as if it's a three dimensional landscape on the left side over here is where I can put in some locations here I'm looking at the lower falls of the grand canyon of the yellowstone this is in yellowstone if I double click on any of the locations that I've saved here it will usually zoom in to where it thinks it is in this case it's off a little bit it's on the canyon right below the waterfall but if I get up here I can look you have some controls in the upper right uh here you can change the direction that you're looking you can also control ifyou're looking straight down or if you're looking more at an angle where you'll get more of the three d equality of what you have and then you have a little hand icon here we can pan around the scene and you could also just click directly on the map and I think if you hold down certain keys on your keyboard like the command key it gives you a different ways of rotating compared to just clicking all by itself but what the heck is this useful for well I want to find out when these two waterfalls will be in the shade so at the top of my screen there's an icon that looks like the sun if I turn it on it's going to try to cast light across this three dimensional image and in the upper left of my screen right here is a slider where I ca n't tell it what date I'm planning on visiting I can also then move this slider across and it will show me on that particular date where it thinks the sun is going to travel across the sky and it's going to visually show me on the image when the sun would cast across those particular areas so watch what happens when I grabbed this slaughter and I'm first move it all the way to the other side over here so right now it is twelve fifty five is the time and I'm just gonna bring this across slowly now it's one o'clock in the morning obviously at one o'clock in the morning be dark right and keep going two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock you know we're going upto almost six am so now you start seeing a little hint of light coming in there can you see it changing a little bit seven forty five in the morning here and I can see when is it going to come up in being the son and then when is that sun gonna change angles enough watch the lower falls where the shade is going to come across and now that lower fall is going to be in the shade the upper one still might have a little bit of light on it so I keep going in about this time of day for twenty two p m sometime between four twenty two pm and before that sun goes down I might wantto capture that that waterfall because it should be in the shade based on the angle the sun will be at at that particular time on that particular day and that pretty crazy way we could also use this and other locations and aren't just waterfalls anything uh any location you're thinking about going to maybe it's a cliff near the ocean and you want to see wins and son going to be hitting the cliff that kind of stuff just type in your location search for it up here it will bring you to that location at the top of my screen is where I have that icon for showing the sunlight then I have this slider but in order to really get good at using this particular software you'll have to look at some tutorials online to see how best to navigate with it and how to turn on various features like that son feature because they're not always there by default and I don't remember on this excite only had to set it up once does it I'm curious does it disable the sun feature if you're looking over seattle yeah it just always looks kind overcast just turns bright and dark there's those three days of the year I think they're in july and august so anyway I could zoom out here on any area that I want pan around and to me this is just the really nice thing because especially when I'm in an area like yellowstone the distance you have to drive between your hotel in the location can be considerable and if you're just going to go there randomly and try to figure out by standing there when it's going to be in the shade to get a good shot of it but you're going to spend a lot of time and energy whereas using google earth makes it pretty darn easy to zero in and figure out what's gonna be happening there any questions or anything similar for that yeah there is a question that just popped up about google earth and they're asking doesn't know about cities and the shadows cast by buildings can you get that specific like you're standing on a street in a city I think there are some areas where it has three d data for cities but I don't know that it's all but I don't use it as much for cities as I do for nature's so I'm not versed in that but as far as I remember google earth has some cities that will have some three d information but not all might be one of those things that you just have to explore yeah just try it out let's look at other aps there are aps I need use on occasion that tell me where is the sun going to go in my image and so there's a couple of them one is called sun surveyor uh is is one particular good one and there's one other which I'll look up later but what these khun do is they will tell you what angle the sun will be at in any particular location at any particular time so you can if there's a location you haven't been to before you can type it in and hear it have its search for uh that location show you hear in a map in then you'll have a slider at the bottom where you can slide through a particular day and time in this little orange ball will move across here to tell you what angle the sun will be falling on that particular location at any particular time of day so if let's say I wanted to shoot a building here in seattle and I want to get that building at a time the sun is hitting the right side of the building from the position I'm standing in well I look up the position on on this app and I orient this so it's the same way I'm looking at the building and that I could slide this little slider around see the sun move across that scene in notices it ever going to hear that face of the building I wanted to be on when I shoot where I think it would look best in this particular case the sun would come up and go down where it would on lee travel in this little arc you say well yellow arc at this particular time of year that is the ark it's going to go and it's never going to be back here never going to be in those areas it's only going to be between these and I could move this slider back and forth this little circle will move across here and at the very top right it will tell me what time of day I'm talking about so that if I wanted the sun at this particular angle to that location maybe at one fifty two p m if I move this little slaughter the sun will move over to a different location and I could glance up there in the corner again to see what time of day it will be over in that location and so if I remember shooting architecture and I look at a scene that run into it it's I want to get it when the sun is you know on the upper right over my right shoulder this is the app that I go to I could move this around figure out if it's gonna happen to be today or I could go to a different time of year by typing in different clicking on the clock the calendar icon and I can experience what I have to come back in july would have to come back in october uh to be able to get the son to be in a particular location and so I think that's a pretty good information to have especially if you're planning a visit to a place you haven't been to before and it's on the other side of the country where you really don't have a good sense for the exact locale all right what else we got in here well there's some maps that I don't have some screen shots for I want to mention uh that I find to be overly useful ah these aps c for travel a few websites that I go to that I find to be overly useful one when I want to look for flights I look att hipmunk dot com it's h I p m u n k dot com that's a website where I can search for flights and instead of coming up with a standard list like most websites do it shows me little horizontal bars for each flight were across the top will be the time like one o'clock two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock across the top in the little bar will tell me the length of my flight so the longer the bar is the longer the flight iss if there's a connection it'll be a different color on that bar so if it's a long connection it's a long gap in there I can also pulling the size to tell it I must land before six p m I'm not willing to get up before a m to get my flight and it eliminate all the the flights that would extend into those particular times which for me really makes it useful and it organizes the flights to the top most flight is the flight that it ranks as having the lowest agony factor agony factor is a combination of the flights cost its duration and the number of connections and all that kind of stuff so it tries to put the best flight it thinks at the top and so for me I like that much better than most other ways of searching for flights once I land one the apse that I will frequently use although this isn't going to be appropriate for everyone because it could cost sometimes a little more is one called uber if I need to go from my hotel to the airport airport to hotel and it's in a major city not every city has this service but what uber will do is when you launch it it will tell you how close to you a sedan iss that could pick you up this right now I used last night took this screen capture and it said there was one three minutes away you see a map in these are actual cars and you'll see the cars driving on this map going down the road and that kind of stuff so you can see if literally once passing by and if you click this bar you can request a car and it will usually show up in approximately the length of time it lists here and when you get your car between the airport your hotel or anywhere in town you don't have to pay in the car you're paying through the app you put your credit card information in the ap there's also no tipping so when you get out of the car there's no dealing with tipping and if you click on the little arrow on the right side you can get an estimate of what your fare will be by taping in your destination and you know be able to estimate what it is sometimes it's cheaper than a taxi but these air black sedans you know like nice transportation so sometimes it is more expensive but I find this just be a nice way if I'm pulling out any location that's in a city and I need to get somewhere else down at the bottom you can sell it if you need an suv so if you have a bunch of gear lighting gear you need to transport between places or anything like that you can choose that and I've never used the feature called uber x but that's a future where you could get a lower price car uh so it's more like a taxi but to me this makes my life so easy when I land at an airport want to get somewhere or I'm leaving my hotel need to go to a location within a particular city uh I find it to be overly useful other apse that I use when I'm in a city is if I need to drive to any location there are various navigation aps you get on phones but most of all I find to be pretty dumb when it comes to traffic and they're going to route me just what were out it thinks with pretty much ignoring traffic or if it pays any attention to traffic it still leaves you on major roads there is one though that will put me on little bitty roads that well save me a lot of time because it's actively looking at anyone else that's using the app to figure out how slow are all the roads in real time and it's called waze w e and that's what I used for getting around any kind of town it gets me around all the traffic and I find it to be overly useful