Photo Planning Made Simple
A Landscape Photography Webinar
Learn how to use simple, powerful tools to plan photos of the sun, moon, Milky Way, or any celestial object
We have powerful tools for photo planning at our fingertips – apps that allow us to predict where the sun or moon might rise or set in relation to the landscape, how the light will look at a given time and place, the position of the Milky Way above the land, and much more.
Unfortunately, many of these tools are excessively complicated, unintuitive, and difficult to learn. I know many photographers who have thrown up their hands and given up when faced with the dense complexity of these apps.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this new webinar I’ll show you how I use a few simple tools to precisely visualize the position of the sun, moon, Milky Way (or any celestial object) in relation to the landscape, and see how the light will change for any scene. We’ll delve into apps like PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, and Planit Pro – but we’ll stick to the things you need to know, bypassing the extraneous stuff that only gets in the way.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Essential features (but only the things you really need!) of the most popular photo-planning apps: PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, and Planit Pro
- No more fussing around with red pins and gray pins! Instead, you’ll earn how to easily and precisely visualize the position of the sun, moon, Milky Way, or any celestial object above the landscape using augmented reality and virtual reality modes.
- How to search for an event – when the sun or moon will be in the right position above a landscape feature
- Visualize how the sun or moon will illuminate the landscape at any time and place (iPhone only)
- See when a rainbow (including a lunar rainbow) will be visible in the spray of a waterfall
The live webinar will take place on February 21st, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (1:00 p.m. Eastern Time). It will last approximately 90-120 minutes. And if you can’t attend live, the webinar will be recorded so you can watch it later.
Click the link below to sign up!
Photo Planning Made Simple, February 21st, 2026
$27 (get 20% off until December 29th with the code PHOTOPLAN20)
Note that in this webinar I’ll use my iPhone to demonstrate the best features of PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, and Planit Pro. Unfortunately one of my favorite tools, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, is only available for iPhone, not Android. But everything else can be used on either platform.
The virtual reality (VR) modes of The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D and Planit Pro allow you to virtually place yourself on the ground in any place at any time, visualize how the scene will look, and see exactly where the sun, moon, or Milky Way will be in relation to the landscape. Here, the virtual-reality mode of The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D (right, below) showed me the moon position and lighting for this scene of Half Dome from December 2024:
Here the virtual-reality mode in Planit Pro (right, below) shows the position of the Milky Way above a Sierra peak on an August evening:
The virtual-reality feature of The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D helped me plan this photo of a solar eclipse sequence from August 17th, 2017, in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. While the peak (El Capitan) looks a bit truncated in the VR version (right, below), I could still see the sun’s path, and its position when fully eclipsed:
Augmented Reality (AR) can be a fantastic tool for pre-visualizing images when you’re able to scout a location in person. Here I used PhotoPills Night AR mode (right, below) to see where the north star would line up with this rock pinnacle in Death Valley, enabling me to visualize, set up, and compose this star-trail photo (left, below) before dark:
The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D allows you see how light will fall on the landscape. I used that feature to determine if there was a time when the water surface on this alpine lake would be in the shade while the mountainside on the far shore would be in the sun. There was, late in the afternoon (right, below), and that allowed me to make this abstract telephoto composition of melting ice on the water, with colorful reflections of the mountainside lit by the late-afternoon sun:
