Apps for working out the best times to shoot in natural light based on your location are not new, but the GoldenHour.One App by Hana Kusova brings together the perfect ingredient of features to compliment any photographer’s planning process for outdoor photography.
Opening the app, you are presented with a 24 hour clock with highlighted portions of golden and blue hours for sunrise and sunsets based on your location. Your homepage also provides a clear indicator to the quality of the golden hour using a “Sky Index” that determines the quality of a dramatic sky, and a “Light Index” which determines the quality of light and temperature for portraiture, landscape, and architecture photography. Favorite locations can be added by clicking on your location, and swiping right takes you to the following day.
The Map tab gives you a visual cue to the direction of the sun at any location in the world, essential for planning where to place yourself for those hero sunset shots. The built in compass tool is very useful for working out the direction you are facing, something which is often overlooked in many navigation apps.
The Weather tab gives an overview of the chances of good quality light and sky for the next few days on a single page, and the Reminders tab lists all of the reminders you have set up, ensuring you wont miss the best sunset of the year when it presents itself at any given location.
As with all the best apps, it just works. Menus are not over-convoluted with unnecessary data and options, it feels like a golden hour app designed by a photographer, for photographers. GoldenHour.One is available from the App Store, is priced at $3.99, and gets the Fstoppers seal of approval.
But not for Android!?
Use PhotoPills instead. It's newly available for Android. http://www.photopills.com/
Looks good. I'll check it out. Thanks!
No Android support makes this a huge fail. Golden Hour app on Android is much better
The Photographer's Ephemeris is also pretty good and comes in both Apple and Android versions. It even has a web application: http://app.photoephemeris.com.
I just purchased this app based on your review and others I read online.
I've been using Sun Seeker for a couple years and I've been very happy with it. There are two versions, a free and a paid. I started with the free but moved to the paid. It's got a whole lot of stuff in it including position indicators of the sun for any given day/location and every feature you mentioned with the exception of the weather integration.
Also a very good app for the golden hour or even more is "Sun Surveyor". It helps me in so many different ways out in the nature or also in the city.
Thanks - just bought it!
Personally, seems like overkill for something that's fairly simple to figure out by just know sunrise and sunset times that appear virtually in most weather apps. But...that's just me.
I like "Sun Position" by Sunkick. In addition to all the maps and charts, it also allows you to go to a location, set a date, point the phone camera at a scene, and it displays on the screen where the sun will actually appear in the scene each hour of the day. Want to know the exact time and spot the sun will just kiss the horizon near that tree in two months? There it is.
It's also worth noting that the great app PhotoPills does this also (as well as being able to forecast the date and time when the Milky Way will be in the position you want to photograph). In fact PhotoPills is stacked with all kinds of useful features, like field-of-view and focal length calculators etc Check it out. http://www.photopills.com/
For Android, try Sun Locator (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.genewarrior.sunlocator...).
It even has a feature that simulates the shadow.
Full disclosure: I'm the developer, so contact me if you have any questions.
Looks like an interesting app, thanks for sharing!