PHOTOPILLS

A MUST-HAVE FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS. $14.99 | photopills.com

If you’re any kind of photographer, ignore the price 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’ 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. Open the Planner and set the map to any location 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. There’s a Milky Way calculator and even an Augmented Reality mode. The learning curve is steep, so 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.