There is a plenty of photography tools published on the web. These tools can be widely used for planning trip, for understanding how your camera is working, for post-processing of your images and so on. In this article I will provide you links to calculators which can be helpful on topics mentioned above. All of them come from Cambridge In Colour web site.
Sun & Moon
Every landscape photographer spent lot of time in planning trip, he has to be sure that he would be on the spot in the right time, the weather would offer probable good to best conditions etc. One of the aspect which photographer could take into account is position of sun or moon. As you probable know, sun or moon are moving on the sky over the year, their positions at the time of rising and falling differs based on date and time. Yeah, it is possible to calculate manually, but would not be much more easy to see position directly on the map of desired place? If you use Sunrise & Sunset calculator or Moon & Night calculator you get even more. In case of Sun you can choose place, date, timezone and you end with estimation of day phases (dawn, sunrise, midday, sunset and dusk). For Moon are valid same entry values, but is calculates start and end of astronomical twilight, midnight time, rises and sets of moon and dates for moon phases within current month.
Hyperfocal distance
Second handful tool is hyperfocal calculator. Focusing your camera at the hyperfocal distance ensures maximum sharpness from half this distance all the way to infinity, which is something extremely important for landscapes photographs. There are two modes, simple (default) and advanced. In the default mode you need to enter only crop factor of your camera, click on the Calculate hyperfocal distances and you will see hyperfocal distances in the combination of aperture (f-stop, in row) and focal length (in column). In the advanced mode you can also select maximal print dimension, viewing distance and eyesight in addition to crop factor.
Panorama pictures
Are you interested in panorama pictures? Are you liked their field of view? If so, you would surely appreciate two Panoramic image projections calculators. First of them is Panoramic field of view calculator. Based on your preferences regarding focal length, camera orientation (landscape, portrait), number of vertical and horizontal images, percentage of its overlaps and your camera crop factor it calculates field of view in vertical and horizontal degrees of angle. Second one is 360° Panorama Calculator which based on your input shows number of horizontal photos.
Sharpening image
The last one covered in this article is calculator focused on the one of most disputed activity in post-processing – sharpening. Sharpening Radius Estimator based on given viewing distance and print resolution offers hint about size of radius used in various Photoshop sharpening tools (Unsharp mask etc.). However, it is only hint, the right settings depends also on other ‘soft’ aspect (image content and interpolation quality).
As you can see, these tools offered lot of features desired by landscape photographs. Moreover, Cambridge in Colour published them as completely free tools together with very nice explanation on such topics. If you know other useful tools, I will appreciate sharing them in the comments at the end of article.
