There is no such thing as bad weather…

… Just my tolerance of it!!

This image was taken a couple of years ago, when I have to say, I was at the height of experimenting with my newly found passtime of photography, and following the purchase of my ND 110, 10 stop filter…

Back then i would have laid in rivers, climbed mountains, walked miles and faced marauding sheep and deer to get the shot…  With the result that I now have, with the exception of a few workable archive images, thousands of useless, over/under exposed, out of focus and rainspotted ‘educational’ shots.

Now, i am not saying that this was the wrong approach, indeed, I think all artists suffer for their art, but the lessons that I learned in that time about light, clouds, wind, time of day, etc now mean that I am more canny about where i go, what time of year, what time of day, and with a plan of what (roughly) i am looking for when I arrive.

I also think that we are now living in times of technology that make this even easier to plan a shoot, as I have found with the enforced purchase of an Ipad (as I left my iphone on top of my car and drove twenty miles before I realised)… and an LightTrac application that will prove , i think , invaluable, for the photographer.

If you have been following my blog you will have seen my post on the Photographers Ephemeris, which i hailed as a fantastic tool, well this app is similar, but portable!

It allows you to plot where you are using the mapping tool and can tell you the time of sunset, sunrise, etc.. and the suns position at any part of the day… allowing you to get , on the spot predictions of shadows and times of events…

I have only recently downloaded it, and used it a couple of times, but I find it useful when deciding where to go and when, and combined with a forecasting app, will hopefully increase my hit rate making being ‘in the right place, at the right time’ more predictable…