How to Plan your Dream Photo

Often, when someone sees a picture of me tells me, that luck, that the sun was well placed, or the Milky Way was in the exact spot. And yes, really in landscape photography the luck factor is very important, but today, we have the tools necessary to plan our photo, and to make us as we imagined in our minds. In this small tutorial I am going to explain some tricks and tools to make photo of your dreams.

Planning tools

The first program that you have to keep in mind when planning a place is the “Google earth”. Before heading to a place that even I do not know, I make a virtual tour to find the most interesting location from which to take the picture. Once this is done, use other programs to calculate the exact time and day in which “my picture” can be realized. I research mainly the following factors: where and what time happen dawn or sunset. How long it will last the golden hour and the blue hour. Where and what time I will have the Milky Way where I dreamed. For this, I recommend two programs, the first is “The Photographer’s Ephemeris” a very complete program with which you can plan everything. The other program, and for me, the most complete is “photopills” this is definitely my main planning tool, is wonderful its virtual reality, and to see your picture on the screen even before shooting. Currently this application only exist in IOS system, but it seems that soon will have its Android version.

The sun and the blue hour

One of the most interesting moments of light when photographing occurs during sunset. The first is known as the “golden hour”. We all know that the sunset will occur in the west, but if we plan where will the sun can get magical moments. In the photograph of the bridge that you can see a little further down, plan the best position of the sun for the light to cross the bridge and thus achieve greater depth.
The next picture plan the day when the sun was behind the big rock on the beach Lumeboo in Spain. I wanted to get a different picture, with high contrast produced by that point of light. To make this photo made a bracketing of five photographs, later combine them and get the planned photograph.

Night and the Milky Way

For me, one of the most magical photographing times occurs when the sun gives way to night. It’s an incredible feeling to see the LCD of your camera and see, as if it were magic, as has captured the Milky Way.
To plan the Milky Way you have to consider several factors, the first is the phase of the moon. Close to the new moon day in which will get more definition to the Milky Way. Another important factor is light pollution. we look for places as far away as possible from towns and villages, but often these lights give us play when composing. Finally we have to plan how we want to see the Milky Way, forming an arc, horizontal or vertival. As we have in mind we have to make our photograph at a certain date. All this is very easy to do with Photopills, you can calculate the date, time and exact location of your Milky Way.
I leave a photo with photopills planned. I wanted the Milky Way aligned with the lighthouse. As previously mentioned, light pollution can sometimes play in our favor in this case mixed with the clouds to get a nice atmosphere. Technical and material required for this type of shots we’ll leave it for next post.

Tips by David Martinez Lombardia

With good planning your photos can go from being good to magical. Use all the tools I must previously named. We always have to have the luck factor, luckily we can not predict everything, and better, because it would lose the charm of photography.
If you want to know more of my work you can follow me on 500px or visit my website. I hope you liked them my typs.

https://500px.com/david_martinez_lombardia
www.mlombardiaphoto.com