PhotoPills
A must-have for photographers
$9.99 From PhotoPills, photopills.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 8.1 or later
If you’re any kind of photographer, ignore the price, head straight to the App Store, and buy this app now. PhotoPills is like a Swiss Army knife for photographers, giving committed snappers a whole array of tools to help plan, visualize, and execute images.
For example, if you’re adding an ND filter to your camera and want to calculate what your shutter speed should be to get the correct exposure, there’s a page for that. Want to calculate your lens’s depth of field? There’s a page for that, too.
There’s a page that calculates how long it will take to generate a time-lapse movie, allowing you to vary the interval between shots, or let the app know how long you want the finished movie to run for, and at what frame rate.
Open the Planner and set the map to any location on Earth — you can opt for satellite imagery or various OpenStreetMap views, which are useful because they include elevations — and PhotoPills will show you where sunlight is currently coming from, where it will be at the beginning of the golden hour, and where the moon will rise. It can tell you where and when those things will happen tomorrow, or any other time in the future, allowing you to plan your landscape shoots precisely, and to accurately estimate what the sunlight will be hitting. Better yet, you can move the map around and see what the light will be there. So if you’re visiting a location to shoot in summer, you can plan everything right now.
For astrophotographers, there’s a Milky Way calculator, allowing you to see where the Galactic Center (the brightest part of our galaxy) will be, and at what angle. There’s even an Augmented Reality mode, using your device’s camera and overlaying where the Milky Way will be in the future — perfect for scoping out a location during the day and making a plan to come back.
The learning curve is steep. In particular, if you’re not comfortable with celestial terms such as azimuth, astronomical twilight, and Galactic Center, prepare to invest a bit of time in the developer’s superb YouTube tutorials. But once you’ve learned the ropes, you’ll never go back to manual methods.
The bottom line. Invest some time to learn it and this versatile toolbox app will quickly prove indispensable.