Perfect Light Every Time? A Photographer’s Secret Weapon

We’ve all been there: a stunning landscape, but the weather forecast was wrong again. Traditional weather forecasts are simply not designed for photographers. But there is a new tool that changes the game.

There are two major problems with common weather forecasts: cheap or free weather services are calculated with “low-resolved weather data.” Imagine downsizing an image with 500 megapixels to just five megapixels, for instance, so your computer can handle it more easily in Lightroom. And when you are finished, you upscale it again to 500 megapixels. You could process an image that way, and you would save a lot of CPU power, but it doesn’t lead to the best possible result, right?

Now, the weather calculation of cheaper forecast services works exactly in that way. They save a lot of server power and time by downsizing real weather data and upscaling it after their calculations. The problem is that a lot of metrics are completely overlooked by that. The forecast results are okay for most people’s activities, but they are not for photographers.

In landscape photography, we want to know if the sky will turn red, if the clouds will get golden, if a pink stripe will occur on the horizon, or if the Milky Way will rise. We also want to know if there will be no distracting moonlight or clouds so that it will be visible and we can photograph it. Traditional weather forecasts don’t take these things into account. They tell us only rough estimations of the general weather, which could be right or wrong in the end.

Before I reveal a simple but powerful solution that will change your game, let’s look at another big problem when photographers use common weather forecasts: they don’t consider the weather around your photo spots. The final weather is just calculated for single points on our planet. But in landscape photography, we seldom photograph just points in the landscape, right? We need a clear light channel, hundreds of miles toward the horizon. So, we would need a weather service that looks broadly around our photo spots.

The Accurate Way

My name is Christian Irmler. I’m a landscape photographer from the Austrian Alps with comprehensive experience in weather forecasting for outdoor photography. Believe it or not, it took me more than 30 years to understand that perfect light is not a question of luck but is quite accurately predictable. Here’s how:

First of all, we need weather maps so we can look around our photo spots. Again, we want to know how the weather will be toward the horizon, not only at the point where we put our camera. Absolutely important here is that the maps are calculated with high-resolved weather data because we want reliable results.

When we break it down, by doing that, we make our own weather forecasts. Is that easy? No, unfortunately not. I promise you, I will show you a quick and simple alternative. But to understand how and why it works, let’s stick to weather maps for a moment:

I invested many years in bringing my maps-based forecasting to a practical level with much trial and error. Even when that helped me to be in the right place at the right time most of the time, I still overlooked the best weather phenomena because of one thing: if you want to get accurate results by using weather maps, you have to observe them multiple times a day for each of your photo spots. That is nothing you would like to do unless meteorology is your big passion—nothing I would recommend to a photographer. But there is an easy way to overcome that issue, and it is ideal for everyone who owns a camera.

The Game0Changer

Nothing is more accurate than using weather maps, calculated by high-resolution data. We just need a way to automate the observation process. And that is possible by a new weather tool I developed over the past years. It is called “Photrus.”

This is quite a clever weather assistant, especially for photographers, that observes high-resolved weather data around your photo spots automatically, 24 hours a day, and sends you a notification when it finds spectacular weather phenomena occurring there. No chance of overlooking the perfect light anymore. And it works worldwide!

Phenomena, Not Basic Weather!

We are not talking about whether it will get cloudy or sunny. We are talking about real photography weather phenomena: rainbows, fire skies, gappy clouds creating light rays breaking through, games between light and shadow in the landscape, sunrises and sunsets with dramatic clouds, monster waves, auroras, the Milky Way, and much more. Right now, as I write this article, Photrus already supports 30 different weather phenomena, and the list is growing. It considers everything an outdoor photographer would dream of, all the knowledge I collected in decades of photographing outdoor scenes, enhanced and leveraged by AI.

And the best part is that Photrus doesn’t just check if the weather phenomena are going to occur; it also considers if they are visible, based on the amount of clouds and the quality of the atmosphere. It simply “thinks” about everything an experienced photographer would consider in their planning. For instance, the phenomenon “fast transitions” only triggers if the type and amount of clouds lead to a dramatic sky worth photographing. When we break it down, we are talking about getting notified about world-class conditions!

Easy To Use

You don’t need to read weather maps! Photrus handles that complicated part for you so it is really super easy to use—even without any prior knowledge:

Just set a pin on a map for each of your photo spots and define the weather phenomena you want to see there. Photrus will send you an email a few days before there is a match.

Photrus is a web app that runs on your phone as well as in a normal internet browser. It notifies you only when it is really sure that the particular weather phenomenon is going to occur. So, if you just go out for photography when you get an alert from Photrus, you will get perfect light almost every time you are out with your camera. And this is really easy, right?

But there is even more Photrus takes into account. In fact, it is the perfect tool for anyone who photographs landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, astro, wildlife, or travel. So, for the whole description, watch the above-linked video and check this clever photography weather app yourself: www.photrus.com.