How to find the best light in the mountains

One of the questions I get asked more frequently: “How do you manage to find the best light when shooting in the mountains?”

We all know that nature is a bit unpredictable and especially in the mountains it can be hard to predict how the light will play; luckily today we can access a lot of informations directly from our phone and we can always get an accurate idea about where the sun would be and how the weather will play in the next few hours.

These are my 4 fundamental apps I use every time to successfully plan a shoot in the mountains.

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Google Earth

The first thing I need when planning a photoshoot is an overall idea of the mountain’s shape and orientation. Are we going to be up on a ridge on down into a valley? Is the place facing South, meaning we will be directly sunlit for the whole day, or we will be in the complete shade of a North face (on the southern hemisphere it would be the opposite)? Are we going for the best place, or there are some much better options nearby?

We can quickly answer to all of these questions by taking a look at the 3D render of the place on Google Earth; messing around a bit on the app it will give us a good idea of the landscape we will work with and where the sun will come from (looking at the little compass displayed at bottom).

Looking at this view, for example, we can understand the the mighty Cresta Signal on Monte Rosa is running East to West, with the South face on the left side, meaning we will always have one side in shade and one side in the sun through the whole day.

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Photo Pills

Probably my favorite app, Photo Pills makes it super easy not only to understand at what time the sun will rise and set on a given location but it also shows the exact direction the light will come from at any time of the year. All we need to do is to open the planner tool, to place the pin in our chosen location and to set the date we will shoot; we will then get the time frames for golden hour, blue hour, angle of sunrise and angle of sunset.

Photo Pills is not free (it should cost around 5,00€ on the App Store) but the infos it provides makes it worth much more than that. Highly recommended.

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Meteo Earth

In addition to the time of the day, the other significant factor that will effect our natural light is the weather. It can be super hard to predict sometimes and it can make or break our shoot: a little layer of fog can give us a magic, once in a lifetime light, but just a touch more would completely delete visibility.

While the only 100% accurate way to know if the weather will help us is to go out and shoot anyway, weather forecasts today are quite accurate, especially within 12-24 hours. There are countless apps and services available today; what I use when in the Alps/Europe is Meteo Blue, while when traveling internationally I found Meteo Earth to be quite reliable almost anywhere in the short term; one thing to note is that many remote places, lacking the amount of weather monitoring station we have in Europe an US, cannot provide a the same amount of real time informations to the forecasting services, resulting in much less accurate forecasts.

My advice here is to try different forecast services in your area and then to pick the one that prove to be the most reliable.

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Sun Seeker

We are now on location, the sun is high and we need to know at what time it will come across that beautiful peak in front of us. What to do? Sun Seeker comes to help us in this kind of scenario: by opening the 3D view (bottom right) it will take our phone camera view, overlaying it with the sun path in the sky, showing us where it will appear at any time of the day.

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90% of the job is being there

“If I was there at that same time, I would have taken that same photograph.”

I have heard a variation of this sentence more times that I can count. It is one of the more widespread beliefs in anyone who has a minimum of experience in outdoor photography: to get a great outdoor photograph you must be in the right place, at the right time.

Unlike many other preconceptions, this idea gets really close to reality. Outdoor photography is not taking place in a studio, where you have full control over lighting and composition. We don’t have strobes and softboxes…well, sometimes we have them too, but that’s another story. Our main light source is always either the sun or the moon; our light modifiers are clouds, fog, mountains and any other natural feature that reflect or shade the light coming from the sun. It appears obvious that we cannot move the sun as we would move a strobe on a light stand. We can’t even trim the power down one stop, or put another diffusion layer in front of it to get a softer light. We have zero control over our lighting.

So all the good outdoor photos that we see around are happening by chance? Not really. The vast majority of them comes from a savvy and accurate planning. Because it is true that we do not have the power to change anything about natural light, but it is also true that we can predict how this light will be, and when. We can know accurately where the sun will be at a given time in a given day and how the shades will fall on the landscape. By looking at weather forecasts we can understand how the sky will appear: clear, cloudy, foggy, rainy…all of these cases will affect the light quality in a different way. It is true, we do not have any chance to adjust ambient light to our needs, but with our experience we can know in advance when we will have the light we want.

Golden hour happens twice a day…we went up for the sunrise but yes, there’s also sunset. We left a bit earlier from the valley floor in order to have some spare time and make the most of the evening light.

Too often people don't realize what’s behind an outdoor photo. Between sunset and sunrise (when I shot the two images above) we spent a cold and uncomfortable night in this small shelter.

Ok, we have the light. Now what?

Another huge piece of the puzzle in outdoor photography is made by the location. Let's face it: there are places that are simply more photogenic than others. If you get up on a ridge at 4500m height in the Alps you have better chances of creating visually interesting shots than you could do in an average, flat place on the valley floor. Yes, there are some amazing photographers around who are capable of creating incredible photos almost anywhere. The chances of you being one of them are pretty low though (nor am I, at all). What we can do is to research and find mountain features, angles and point of views that we know will translate into a compelling image. These kind of locations in outdoor photography, especially on the mountains, are usually quite far from the beaten path and often really difficult to reach. The reason is simple: all the easiest and obvious spots are already over photographed. Some of those spots offer world-level views (think about Tunnel View or Glacier Point in Yosemite, Braies Lake, Seceda ridge, Trolltunga…the list is long) and they are more than worth the photos they get. The problem is that there’s not creativity anymore. Thousands of photographers are shooting that same image not because they envisioned it the same way but because they saw someone else’s work and just went there to do the same. They reverse the creative process, trying to understand what someone else already did to get that result. Although this approach is not new it has been growing tremendously in the past decade thanks to the social media and Instagram in particular. There are places so insta-famous that the trails are now eroded by the people walking there to take a snapshot…I digress, sorry.

Back on locations, since the accessible and easy to find ones are overseen, you must look further away. Be prepared to walk hours, to sleep outside, maybe to deal with technical difficulties to reach the place you choose. It is a lot of effort. And you have to do it timely, when the weather and conditions will create a light which is as close as possible to the one you envisioned.

Sometimes reaching the shooting location is much more complicated than might ever look from the final photos…

Well, you did everything right and brought back some great photographs, some that you’re proud of. When you will show them to your friends and family, there will be somebody saying that “I could have done the same if I was there.” Apart the fact that this is not true, in the sense that if you place two capable photographers in the same place at the same time they will create really different pictures, the point is another one: yes, maybe you would have taken the same image, but you were not there. You didn’t thought about shooting in that place at that time, you didn’t make the effort to get there.

In outdoor photography to set an aperture and shutter speed and to press the shutter button is only the easiest part of the job. 90% of it is knowing where and when to be in order to take a great photograph, and then to be there.

Backlight helps defining subjects. In order to have the right angle we waited for the afternoon before getting up on the wall.