Why choose TPE?
What’s different about The Photographer’s Ephemeris (iOS) that might make you choose it over alternatives?
“If Your Business Doesn’t Have Competition, You Have A Problem”.
Happily, I think :), the photo planning app market supports a healthy number of competitors, showing there’s solid demand from photographers for these types of tool. This wasn’t always the case. TPE was the first map-based software planning tool designed for photographers, as far as I’m aware.
Mobile apps are where the current action is, and today there are a number of offerings out there. Map-based planning, az/alt search, and augmented reality are available in most (including in TPE).
This all begs the question, why choose TPE? Here are seven things that we think make our iOS app stand out from the alternatives.
1. Night mode
Night photography has exploded in popularity in recent years. TPE offers a view you won’t find in other apps: a true 3D map overlay of the night sky, showing the band of the Milky Way, the galactic centre (the brightest part of the Milky Way), Polaris and Polaris Australis (for star trails), the major stars and asterisms (such as the Plough or Big Dipper).
The 3D map overlay gives a unique view of the night sky, as if viewed from outside your personal planetarium, overlaid on whichever map type is best suited for your location. There’s a tutorial here.
2. Map gestures: rotate and tilt
Maps. Doesn’t every photo planning app offer maps? Sure. But the implementations vary significantly. The ability to interact freely with the maps is an important aspect of being able to use them effectively to explore and understand potential shooting locations.
Some competitors to TPE leave you hamstrung in this regard by removing your ability to rotate or tilt the map. Rotating allows you to align the map with your potential line of sight to your subject. Tilting can give a clearer sense of the layout of a larger area, by compressing the foreground and extending how much background map area can be accommodated by your device’s screen. And with a 3D map overlay you can gain a much better understanding of how objects in the sky relate to the situation on the ground:
3. Map types
Again, maps. Doesn’t every photo planning app offer maps? Sure. But the available map types vary significantly. Different shooting situations lend themselves to different maps types. Shooting in the city? A street map with 3D buildings might be best. At a sporting event? A satellite map will probably show details you can’t see on a street map. In the mountains? A terrain or topographic map is often best.
With satellite maps, some areas may have poor coverage from one map provider, but better imagery with another.
TPE offers a total of seven map types and includes both Apple and Google Maps, the two map providers most familiar to users on iOS. In addition, TPE offers Open Street Map and Open Cycle Map Topographic maps, both of which are available for offline use — another important scenario for the travelling photographer.
4. Azimuth lines
This might seem a small point, but in terms of usability, it’s a significant one. Oftentimes, to plan a shot, you need to identify both camera and subject on the map. You may need to adjust the map pan around and zoom in and out to check precise locations, while getting a sense of the overall shot setup.
If your shot involves an alignment of the sun or moon, then you probably want to be able to view the sun, moon or galactic center alignment while making these adjustments. Not all apps allow for this: you’ll see that in some cases the azimuth lines don’t extend off the map at all, but are constrained to a circular area within the map bounds. As soon as you need to pan away from the current map position, you either lose sight of the azimuth lines altogether, or they get reset, making it hard to check alignments over any distance.
TPE draws all azimuth lines to a distance of 200 miles from the primary pin location. That distance was not chosen by accident: that’s about as far as the longest point-to-point view you’ll find in all but specialist circumstances. It doesn’t matter how far you zoom in or out, there’re always 200 miles of azimuth line to explore.
5. Sightlines
It’s a common misconception that sunrise means the moment the sun appears, even when that’s from behind a hill.
Not so.
Sunrise is, by convention, defined as when the sun pops over the true horizon, i.e. irrespective of any hills, buildings, trees or clouds that might or might not be in the way. People generally understand this if you conduct a simple thought experiment: if you were to stand on the west side of a house, the sun might not appear until after lunch. Is that sunrise? Clearly not.
TPE will check the sightline for sunrise, moonset etc. on demand to see if the actual rise or set event is obstructed by hills, ridges or mountains. If it is obstructed, it will tell you where. Tap again and you can view the actual sightline along the direction of rise or set. Given that the very best light for many types of photography happens right at sunrise or sunset, it’s important to know if your view is unobstructed. More details here.
But there’s more. With the geodetics tool, you can survey point-to-point distances, elevation differences, bearings and more. Other apps now offer this too, but TPE takes things further with its automatic sightline analysis. Going beyond just a simple elevation profile, the app calculates the angle of view along the sightline and shows what is visible (solid line) and what is not (dotted line).
This is a powerful capability: rather than doing spot checks, you can see at a glance where the high point will be on a given sightline, making it trivial to determine if your subject is visible from your shooting location.
There’s even more. If you’re shooting in a city, for example, and wish to place the sun or moon above or alongside a building, with TPE you can specify the building height. The geodetics tool will show you where the sun and moon sit relative to the given building height. Want a full moon sat atop the Empire State Building on your trip next month? You can plan that with TPE. (AR won’t help if you’re not physically there…)
6. Sync locations with the TPE web app
Sometimes it’s easier to plan on a large monitor. With TPE you can synchronize all your saved locations to the cloud and then use the free TPE web app for desktop planning. You can also use Apple’s Handoff technology to open a shot directly from your mobile on your laptop.
7. TPE 3D
TPE for iOS is also integrated with The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D. TPE 3D is a new app that shows how the light will fall on the land using an interactive 3D model. This is a unique way of visualizing natural light from the sun, moon and stars on your iPhone or iPad.
With the “Open in TPE 3D” function in TPE, you can plan in 2D and then visualize in 3D. See how easy it is to find the perfect date for the “Diamond Mt Fuji” shot:
With TPE, there is an ecosystem of apps to help with photo planning. We don’t try to solve all the world’s photo planning problems in a single app.
There’s plenty of choice for photographers in terms of apps and tools. Other apps have features that TPE does not. You might find it useful to own several of them — they’re not exactly expensive compared to DSLRs, lenses and tripods.
That said, we think TPE is finely tuned to the needs of outdoor and landscape photographers. We’ve tried to focus on the things we think are most important for outdoor photography shot planning.
We hope you agree.
