iPhone and iPod touch Apps for the landscape photographer

Death of my Palm

In my previous article Top 5 photography gadgets I listed the Palm Pilot as my number one gadget in my camera bag because it provides so much useful information such as sunrise/sunset and tide information. However, my Palm Pilot has finally bitten the dust and I simply don’t like the new Palms, a triumph of form over function in both hardware and OS design, and not terribly good form at that! Can an Apple iPod Touch or iPhone fill the Palm’s boots?

I’m also trying to reduce the weight in my camera bag, read more about this in an upcoming article, and wondered if I really needed the Palm Pilot at all. I used the Palm for quite a lot of stuff from diary and address info to photography and location info, but it didn’t really seem relevant to a single day out photographing. I can remember enough about hyper-focal distances to get by and important phone numbers are in my mobile phone, which generally doesn’t work as I’m in locations with no signal But I missed sunrise/sunset and tide information as it is really key to a lot of my coastal photography and sometimes I simply forgot to check the internet before I left home. This was a bit of a problem on longer trips. The excellent paper based Quicktide tide tables are one solution, but you need a few to cover the whole country. At least they don’t need batteries or charging though!

The recent introduction of Apps to the Apple iPod Touch (and iPhone) had me quite excited, being a bit of an Apple fan-boy and gadget fiend. But I was actually quite disappointed when I first went to the App Store - lots of games and social networking apps. Not really me and not that useful for me, but there are some good ones if you are into that kind of thing. Not much for photographers though which was no real surprise at the launch, and certainly not if you weren’t near a wifi network for the app to do that, rather useless, cloud based computing thing or had an iPhone. So I left it to see what developed.

A few days with man flu whilst on a trip to Shetland gave me some time to play around and there are now (as of August 2008) some really useful Apps. Useful in functionality, and useful in that they work standalone so you don’t need a wifi or 3G connection for them to work.

PhotoCalc

PhotoCalc is a complete reference for every photographer. It includes calculators for:

1. Exposure
2. Depth of field
3. Hyper-focal distance
4. Flash exposure calculations

And a reference section that includes:

1. Sunny 16 rule (not sure how useful this is in the age of super accurate matrix/evaluative metering and integrated lightmeters)
2. Ansel Adams Zone System
3. Filter types
4. Film types
5. Glossary
6. Sunrise/sunset (see below)

This is a great little App. Being able to accurately calculate the hyper-focal distance and the limits of focus when I’m using wide angle lenses close-up to the subject is really handy for maintaining depth of field from near to far, and I’ve recently started doing a bit of monochrome photography again, so access to the Zone System descriptions is very handy.

The sunrise/sunset calculator is the one fly in the ointment. An iPod Touch or first generation iPhone tries to find it’s current position by triangulating against known wifi hotspots. Great in US city centres, oddly not so useful on a remote Scottish coastline! This would be OK if you could set your current location manually, but you can’t so you are likely to get the sunrise/sunset time for Washington (the default current location). Not really the developers fault, but other App developers bypass this and add a location list you can select from, but PhotoCalc doesn’t at present. However the developer does say this is in the pipeline.

Great App. 4 out of 5 stars, 5 out of five when the location database is added with sufficient locations - the sunrise/sunset of London, Edinburgh and the north of Scotland (all UK) are very different.

AyeTides

PhotoCalc gives me useful info, but the fundamental info I needed to get was sunrise/sunset and the tides. There are a few Apps that provide either of these bits of info, but they are all US centric and/or require you to be online or suffer from the current location problem. Then I found AyeTides which allows you to select a location and doesn’t need to be online to work. But £8.99! Wow, that’s expensive for an App and the slightly clunky developer website with the comically named desktop software version called Mr Tides didn’t fill me with confidence. There is also no mention of which locations the App covers, so it could have been US centric with few UK locations making it next to useless.

However I was desperate, and the developer very kindly gives away for free the desktop version (sorry Mac only) so I thought I would try the desktop version to give me a flavour of the iPod/iPhone version. Wow, plenty locations worldwide, and good tide and sunrise/sunset info. So I ponied up the £8.99. Heck, it’s only 8.99 not 89.99, iPod Apps are very cheap, maybe too cheap, but that’s another story.

The App is just as good as the desktop version, which is itself very useful and well designed. You select or search for a location, called Stations, which you can optionally add to a favourites list if you go there a lot and you then have access to:

1. High tide/low tide, for the current date or any day you select (see below for a warning for the uninformed in the UK)
2. Sunrise/sunset times
3. Moonset/moonrise times
4. Latitude/longitude of the current station

One cool feature is if you are on the station information page, if you hold your iPod/iPhone in portrait orientation then you get text info, if you turn it to landscape orientation you get a graph view of the tides and the sunrise/sunset times. Fabulous!

One slight warning if you are in the UK, there is a difference between BST and GMT and I was ignorant about this difference. I checked the calculated tides against local tide tables and they looked like they were approximately an hour out with high/low tide times, but the actual height appeared reasonably accurate. I contacted the App developer about this and he explained that the App uses BST (British Summer Time or daylight saving time) and the reference site I look at uses GMT. Before his help I wasn’t particularly aware of there being a difference but it is worth knowing about and understanding if the time of high or low tide is going to be important to where you are going. As ever, if you are going somewhere that the tide will be critical or there is a risk you could get trapped in a location by the tide then check the local tide tables too.

Customer support was fast, friendly and fun!

AyeTides gets a definite thumbs up and 5 out of 5 stars and is well worth the cost of £8.99. Simple and useful. If you still think it is expensive, think of it as getting a free desktop version with the App.

Conclusion

The iPod touch and the iPhone aren’t as good a PDA as the original Palm Pilots because entering data with the Palm stylus and Grafiti was so easy, but that ship has sailed. But the PhotoCalc and AyeTides Apps make the iPod Touch and iPhone really useful tools to the serious and professional photographer, especially landscape photographers. And I can take some music, films or podcasts with me to remote places to keep me company. Now, about that solar panel for charging .....

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