SunCalc – Awesomely useful website for photographers

If you’re a photographer, amateur or professional, then you’ll know that the two best times of the day to photograph landscapes is the golden hour – that period of about an hour after sunrise and before sunset. At that time the rays of light from the sun are at their softest and you get far better photos as a result. The rising and setting sun also make pretty awesome subjects for photographs. the difficulty lies in working out where the sun is going to be at a particular location in order to get the most your time shooting.

SunCalc is a terrific Google Maps mashup that enables you to see exactly where the sun’s going to rise and set and indeed where it will be at any hour of the day. You can click around the map to set a location, manually search for an area and set a specific time and date. So for instance if you wanted to take a photo at the coast at the weekend, you can find out ahead of time exactly where the sun will be at all times.